Les plus lus ▸
Robert Frost
Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In one last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
‘Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
come back to the gun
mother
come out of the country
of the deer
green ink at the office
life should not be less
than half hope
deer in the garden
a letter to my wife
telling her my mind
white deer
the park is troublesome
with the dust of war
a sleeping rain
my mouth still
after dining and talking
deer come in the night
where should I be
if not in my mind
a deer is more than ink
something real
yet the expectation of profit
will make a man bland
like a lone shoe
or the corpse I find in my head
summer is dead
i found her green leaf body
at the foot of an oak
in the first snow
blanketing the valley
the smell of diesel
100 feet downridge
there’s a fallen nest
woven from strips of wild
gravevine bark
the trees are becoming
more and more vacant
though they shriek
and moan in the wind
i remember what jesus
said about new wine
and the deer came
on long legs between the trees
and clashed antlers with a sound
old and dry as the wind
gnats danced as if
summer had returned
for one day only
everything must go
through a gray mist that may
have been in my head
i measured the mountain
with my body pacing it out
i walked among birches
nothing but blank pages
overtook milkweed
giving birth to clouds
the moon over my shoulder
is already half-lit
i turn my hand palm-up
it fills with starlight
flying squirrels scold
in an ethereal key
i’m sitting beneath their
favorite mother oak
i take a deep breath
of autumn soil fragrance
a whitetail buck grunts
more as if in pain than in lust
there’s a thunder of hooves
then nothing
a dead leaf drops
into my hand
swamp forest
hugging the bucket
of blueberries
blackberry patch
the secret beds
made by deer
what blooms at the dark
edge of the forest
a faded red that could also
be dropped leaves
the calling cards of drought
on a Saturday in mid-July
a monarch butterfly chrysalis
falls from the sky
with its golden ellipsis
too bitter a pill
for some young bird
still learning how to forage
blueberries ripen
cracks widen in the moss
the deer’s pelt twitches
under an endless assault of flies
wren wiping his bill
on the ridgeline of the roof
his mate already brooding
on a second clutch
the first clouds always
look innocent enough
until they open
their rainy mouths
catbird singing out
instructions for assembly
a deer sneezing
from her day bed in the weeds
this is how one gauges
one’s aptitude for silence
in Figure 1 we can see
how the trend lines wander