Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

226 PA RT T W O

Our distant closeness in which the wild deer appear, eyes effortless and lips
nuzzling, gives way to cosmic “distances / Of sun.”
Here a long pause opens, a whiteness, the poem’s forest clearing with no
punctuation as shading leaves “Hang in the distances”

Of sun

The small nouns

Small beauty—this the forest has. And small nouns, a baker’s dozen of them:
deer, eyes, lips, teeth, grass, roots, mouths, earth, woods, paths, fields, leaves,
sun. A loving wordsmith has been speaking all along.
The small nouns are “Crying faith,” for Oppen wants to place that sacred
term and task in poetry’s care,

Crying faith

In this in which the wild deer

Startle, and stare out.

It ’s easy now to circle back, finding faith in the forest ’s “small beauty.” The
forest is simply where wild deer abide, and as Dickinson once said, “Beauty is
Nature ’s fact.” But “this in which” they “Startle, and stare out” must be some-
thing and somewhere else—if only because Oppen oddly entitled his entire book
notPsalmbutThis in Which, setting that much store by the phrase.
Where the deer bed down, where they feed, roots dangling and paths nibbled
—that would be forest, woods, fields. But they startle and stare out only at some
sudden strangeness, otherness. So “this in which the wild deer / Startle, and
stare out” must contain the alien presence they’ve just now noticed. Crying faith
in this new dimension, this wild wholeness—woods, deer, witness—creates
a poet ’s Psalm.
If you’ve ever slowly stalked deer just to get as close as possible, you know
how at one moment suddenly becoming aware, they look over at you, but in
poising they don’t yet bolt. Bob Hass sees it this way:

What I want happens

not when the deer freezes in the shade

and looks at you and you hold very still

and meet her gaze but in the moment after

when she flicks her ears & starts to feed again.

Oppen only has them “Startle, and stare out” in a tense balance, here and now.
Meshing the poetry of nature with the nature of poetry, his lines stop right
then.
Stopped, poised, the deer “stare out.” These words acknowledge ourselves,
our human selves, at the last possible moment. Now it could go either way. The