Praise: The day the deer danced in a circle

September 22, 2013, 5:22 a.m. (Camera date and time.)

I must have written about this before, but cannot find the blog post if I did.

I know I wished the light had been better. (That's the first bit of sunrise

glowing from the left, and the dance was over by then.) Some of the deer

have already returned to the forest beyond. These three are browsing

slowly in that direction and in a minute or two will disappear into the wood. 

This dance took place eight days after my birthday in 2013. I had just

turned 78 years old. I was up early and may have come downstairs to take

some pictures of the dawn. On the west side of the house, six deer were dancing

in a circle. Honestly! Some of the young ones jumped about, and did some

playful head-butting. The dance went on for a long time. I almost held my breath 

and was very careful not to make any noise.

Most of the pictures I had to take through the windowscreen since the dance 

was taking place in the West Meadow of our home in Emmet County, Michigan.

Later, I found a reference to a scientific paper on this sort of group-play 

that deer have been observed to do, but it was on a scientific site I did not have access to.

I could tell from the abstract that this behavior had been observed and studied.

In less than two months, I will observe my 80th birthday; it's a little scary.

And this was one of the very most unexpected and interesting things I have ever seen!

PRAISE

Knee-deep
  in the ferns
    springing up
      at the edge of the whistling swamp,

I watch the owl
  with its satisfied,
    heart-shaped face
      as it flies over the water--

back and forth--
  as it flutters down
    like a hellish moth
      wherever the reeds twitch--
      
whenever, in the muddy cover,
  some little life sighs
    before it slides into moonlight
      and becomes a shadow.

In the distance,
  awful and infallible,
    the old swamp belches.
      Of course

It stabs my heart
  whenever something cries out
    like a teardrop.
      But isn't it wonderful,

What is happening
  in the branches of the pines:
    the owl's young,
      dressed in snowflakes,

are starting to fatten--
  they beat their muscular wings,
    they dream of flying
      for another million years

over the water,
  over the ferns,
    over the world's roughage
      as it bleeds and deepens.

Mary Oliver

House of Light; poems by Mary Oliver, 

Beacon, 1990, pages 46-47.