Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

This Morning I Watched the Deer This morning I watched the deer with beautiful lips touching the tips of the cranberries, setting their hooves down in the dampness carelessly, isn’t it after all the carpet of their house, their home, whose roof is the sky? Why, then, was I suddenly miserable? Well, this is nothing much. This is the heaviness of the body watching the swallows gliding just under that roof. This is the wish that the deer would not lift their heads and leap away, leaving me there alone. This is the wish to touch their faces, their brown wrists— to sing some sparkling poem into the folds of their ears, then walk with them, over the hills and over the hills and into the impossible trees.