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  • The Supple Deer
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The Supple Deer

Jane Hirshfield

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.


Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief (Bloodaxe Books, 2012)

Reproduced by permission of the author and the publisher.

Tags:

agility American poetry deer envy grace metamorphosis speed
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Jane Hirshfieldb.1953

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recently published Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011, Bloodaxe, 2012) and a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997). Bloodaxe has also brought...
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