My beloved is like a gazelle or a young deer.

Look! There he stands behind our wall,

gazing through the windows,

peering through the lattice.

Song of Songs, 2:9

Straight out in front of me this very moment is a gray cedar plank fence visible through the window. This is where my writing desk is situated, so I can look outside over the top of my laptop screen. I’ll try to describe a few things I can see from here.

There are leafless trees, which at this hour, are facing the morning sun and lit with its warm light. A little to my left is what appears to be a enormous mountain of an oak, but is really three large oak trees that have joined their crowns and become one mighty thing. Patches of mistletoe are scattered amidst their intertwined boughs. Beyond the fence is a field and then Rice road, named after the farmer who once plowed, planted and harvested this part of the county until it began to be bought up and developed as a little city and suburb of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital. The field remains open and later this year someone will come mow it and bail the hay.  

I’ve always been surprised we don’t have a problem with mice here in the house being right on the field. But there are enough hawks around here to keep them from creeping into our kitchen, I guess. Once when I was walking back from the mailbox a hawk nearly head-butted me as it swooped through the crape-myrtles after some prey.

This morning the field was frosted and pale as dawn drew near. If the yappy dogs next door don’t wake me, the slow approach of morning sifting through my open window does. That is my favorite way to wake. If all goes perfectly, I wake up at the same pace and speed as the sunrise and the birds slowly fold in their many songs just as I’m awake enough to hear them. There is something clean and constant about birdsong to me; morning descends with the coo of a dove and lights on, well, everything.

There have been a few times – it is rare I’ll admit – that I’ve beat the birds to it. I learned this from my Dad – how to get up before dawn and make my way to the woods. It was an unpleasant lesson to learn as a kid, but it has paid off the older I’ve gotten. In fact, I do it on occasion by myself and voluntarily. It is a wonder to sit in the woods before the world has stirred and to hear the first knockings, quips, and gibberings rise around you in the gray world. Then to see the trees put on first silver and blue, then sudden orange and coral. I sat very still once reading in a tree at a friend’s house and a squirrel crept very close. Until that moment, I had not known that they can make a sound almost like the purring of cat.

A shadow darts across the yard; some feathered thing is gliding overhead out of my range of vision. The Three-Tree Mountain sends its roots deep to keep the earth from being washed away. The tiniest birds hop and flit excitedly on the grass in the chill air. Trees bustle and murmur and their talk sounds like a constant soft “shushing”.  

Out the window now my eyes return to the gray cedar plank fence. Some odd planks have fallen out and lay in the yard. Then there are the tall thin vertical spaces between the planks maybe a centimeter wide. The old gray planks are like the majority of the time when I see what I expect to see on the worn surface of things (or is it my eyes that are worn?), but through the spaces between I sometimes catch a broken image of a form moving just on the other side of the fence in that broad field.  It is a shadowed body walking slowly on the other side, letting its shape sift through the cracks to my eyes, or letting my eyes through the cracks. It is a deer making its slow, silent way along the fence-line.

If you walk often enough in the woods, you can discover deer paths. In the pine thickets they appear as very soft roads pressed in the pine-straw – a few inches deep and maybe six inches wide. You can see the evidence of presence and passage by these little trails.

The world is full of shy things. Things that leave footfall and tracks if the soil is soft enough to receive them and hold their shape – like hands tender toward bread or tongues tamed toward wine. It’s true too that there are jagged edges where the world has broken and fallen in on itself in cataclysm and fury, where blood is spilled and brows sweat with anxiety. We have often left our prints too like bruises on flesh until unnatural becomes second nature and we mistake it for nature.

I’m told it may actually snow this week here in Mississippi. They say a mystery will fall from the sky and will not be content until it has watered the earth, made itself known. The Lord says that his ways and thoughts are high above ours, and that he says something like “let there be rain” and down pours his words in language that can seep deep down into our soil and waken sleeping seed.

I’m looking at the slender cedar-framed apertures again.

Making its shy way along the fence-line, appearing through the cracks, is a strange shape – a body glimpsed through a thousand shadowed shapes, like letters accumulating into words, into sentences, into a story. There is nothing in this Creation that might not be a gap in the fence to let through an utterance from the field on the other side, each like a single frame making up a moving picture.  

I am watching the fence, guessing toward the shape I see moving now through the slender windows – is it the farmer come to check up on his field? Is it a shy Deer? Is it a Face?

My beloved is like a gazelle or a young deer.

Look! There he stands behind our wall,

gazing through the windows,

peering through the lattice.