St. Stephen’s uses poetry in our worship every week. In these posts our rector, Karl Stevens, a poet himself who publishes as KPB Stevens, will reflect on the poems we use. The poems are chosen by our Canticle Club. If you are interested in joining the Canticle Club, send an email to Stuart Hobbs.

Standing Deer

By Jane Hirshfield

As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

I don’t know why this poem affects me as it does, but I know that I feel it first in my body. I read Hirshfield’s words and I sit back in wonder, and feel a loosening of my shoulders, a settling of my gut. I feel my fear lift. It is remarkable that a poem can do that.

As a priest, I often enter people’s houses. I see their possessions. I move aside vases of flowers or yellowed papers or faded photographs to make space for my communion kit on a coffee table. I look my own home, and see how it is “cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with.” Ever since I completed the 19th Annotation of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises last year, I have wanted to get better at holy poverty. And yet my home is cluttered. Ever since I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, I’ve looked at the objects that surround me and wondered which of them are imbued. It’s a powerful word, imbued. In Hyde’s telling, it means those objects that have passed through so many hands, are so rich with story and meaning, that they have a secret personality, known to those who know their history. My grandfather’s guitar. The library table that my wife’s ancestor shortened so that it could be used as a coffee table. An imbued object is too loved and too heavy to part with. These objects resist a desire for holy poverty.

The mind is equally cluttered, but it grows sparer, as Hirshfield says, as I age. Those memories that I once thought were so important, those little nostalgia stimulants, are fading. I have more space in my mind as they grow dim. I once wanted to fill my mind’s empty spaces with facts, with history, with theories that proved my intelligence. Now I meet a new idea like a stranger at a party. We talk for a while. We like each other. But there are other people at the party for us to talk to as well. And we’re more attentive to a sound that thrums through the clatter of voices. Like music that’s been turned down too low to hear, but occasionally a word or melody breaks through. We hum it together. The new thought and my mind hum a strange melody together.

I continue to live, and to encounter the world. Mornings are full of possibility. Evenings are “filled and empty.” I become too tired for fresh encounters and interactions with the life around me. I feel Hirshfield’s “why not.” Why not be excited by the potentials of a day. Why not let that day pass quietly, let even momentous things pass quietly, as evening comes? “Teach us to care and not to care,” T.S. Eliot writes at the end of “Ash Wednesday.” “Teach us to stand still.”

Near the end of “Standing Deer,” Hirshfield addresses herself to the Beloved. This is my own most frequent word for God, so I imagine that she’s speaking to God. But it could be to a lover or a friend. That “beloved” could be addressed to me, the reader. Does it matter? Does it matter who she offers her acceptance to? Does it matter who she asks for forgiveness? She isn’t asking for absolution. She is clearing away the clutter of need that strives for healing, for the restoration of broken relationship. No restoration is asked for, because need has gone. Apology is at its purest when absolution isn’t asked for.

See things. Observe them. That is how our roots find nourishment. Participate. Draw the life up into yourself so that you can be alive. That is what blessing is. Seeing a deer out of the window. Seeing it vanish, as you, too, will someday vanish. Discovering the peace in this. Finding a home within that peace.