Susan Wicks: Deer

You have come at last, my visitors,
nosing for small plants in the duff
of needles. Your eyes reflect

my image drowing 
in silt; the coarse hair of your sides
is matted, crusted with winter.

I have no heart for visits, no heart
to see myself, for the shy dance
of grazing shadows. You lift your heads

and freeze. Do you scent me
even through the pane, can you hear me
leaving? But you are

ordinary beasts, you are only
rooting for the sparse greens, scratching about 
like anyone. And tomorrow

You will bring your young
to feast on the common mosses
outside an empty cabin. Welcome.


Published 1998. Wicks is British and a creative writing academic; a glass-half-empty view of this poem might see it as an assured, "comfortable", creative writing course exercise. Perhaps it is too neat, its tensions arranged like a dinner setting. But it plays with visions of sufficient strength and sufficient contrasts in time (the picture of the deer returned to the cabin with the poet gone) for there to be genuine life here, in the images of cold and separation.