GEORGE OPPEN’S PSALM OF ATTENTIVENESS 225small beauty of the forest.” His small word “small” trips the clichéd “beauty
of the forest” into an alert, a bit of news about where true beauty occurs, much
as Theodore Roethke praised “The small! The small!” Then an ongoing verb,
“bedding down,” and a dash arrest the action. It ’s not: “In the forest the wild
deer bed down,” or “The wild deer bedding down are beautiful.”
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!In other words (though a poem shuns other words), it ’s enough “That they
are there!”
Right then something rare happens. Beginning his next stanza deeply in-
dented, just under an exclamation point, Oppen pronounces a quiet echo: “That
they are there! / / Their eyes.. .” These th-sounds merge “there,” an adverb of
place, with “Their,” a pronoun of possession. Across a space they link forest to
deer, a place to its creature. Now it ’s their“there.” And they’re there, nothere
where we or the speaker may be.
“Their eyes / Effortless.” Just how close is this, to spot effortless eyes, soft
lips, small teeth? Thirty feet? Three feet?—to see their “soft lips / Nuzzle,”
their “alien small teeth / Tear at the grass”? Surprising us over line breaks,
“Nuzzle” and “Tear” zoom in on what our naked eye never witnesses. And why
“alien”? Given such extreme focus, have we entered the mind of grass?
Then as if the grass weren’t close enough, again deeply indented,
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
Grass roots and bits of earth magnify and slow things down, greatening their
impact. But “strange” woods? Strange to the deer? Not likely. To a human be-
holder? The scene shows none. Oppen is staking out unfamiliar terrain, wilder-
ness as in medieval “wild-deer-ness,” a place protected from farming, from
human (peasant) footprint.
The same taut cadence as “That they are there!” underpins this stanza too,
now a touch quieter—“They who are there”—and still with no platitude or
piety about animals and wilderness. Again a short line prompting an indent
produces the mysterious echo.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun