It was because I had love in my heart
the way a deer has home in the brush, 
the way fifty deer can blend still  
with the naked oaks and wizened leaves  
on a day lit pale gray, how the man
with bad eyes won’t see one until
it moves, and how, if he feels gracious,  
he’ll smile and call them sweet  
babies and hold them tender in his gaze 
with a quiet voice before they leap  
away and crackle the ground. I called you  
because I’d never been more at peace  
with the cloud cover and the lack of color  
in the woods or the grass or the brown brick  
houses. Never happier to see the packed silt  
beneath my feet like a millionth-washed  
pair of blue jeans. My smile was this wide  
and, when I came across those does  
silently stamping their history into the dead,  
I was certainly in love. And I could tell  
you what got me there, I could tell you  
the strain of each day, the fatigued muscles  
and heartache, but none of it mattered  
then and I’ll do it again, probably  
a thousand times. When the sun had already set over  
the field and the track, I loved the ghostly lack  
of edges in the stadium lights, the tree just twigs  
and branches, the sky polluted gray-white, the grass  
with the countenance of a stone, the earth  
a frozen laborer. And when I got in my car  
in the dark to drive away I found you  
in my mind, and right now I realize you  
were there the day before too, in the sun  
with gold in your ear and a navy-blue work shirt,
a black apron and your orange glint in the dusk  
glow hung over the river. It was cold  
today and that’s just—I swear  
I called to give, not to take.