Poem for Friday and Neighborhood Deer

How to See Deer
By Philip Booth

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk
look into light falling:
in deep relief

things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.

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Thursday night feels like a weekend night because Paul's agency gave everyone Friday off, so everyone can have a long Memorial Day weekend not going anywhere! I am feeling pretty bummed, as this was a weekend we'd talked about meeting our kids in one city or another and it's not like we can go to the beach or Skyline Drive instead, let alone make plans with friends. Pretty much all my friends who have kids have at least one at home, which is a mixed blessing but I have no clue when I'll see mine off Skype.

It was a fairly quiet day -- beautiful weather again, Target delivering cat food, putting in a bagel order, lots of scanning -- and since the photos are now from before the mid-80s, I'm not sure of the year for many of the pics so they're harder to sort. We watched two Inspector Morse episodes on PBS in the evening and the sexism really pissed me off, plus "Day of the Devil" may have Richard Griffiths but it has every cliche about the occult too. From the past couple of days' neighborhood walks, the family of deer in the woods: