The Shape of an Answer

Susanna Baird's fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of publications, including Across the Margin, The A3 Review and Punchnel’s. She runs the journal Five Minutes and has been a featured reader at the Salem Literary Festival and on the Improbable Places Poetry Tour. She drives the back route between Connecticut and Massachusetts nearly every week of the year.

The year is old, the day early, the light not an advancing force but the grey that’s left when night departs. Everything’s shades of winter morning, the sky, the hills with a thin layer of snow, the farm fields, the road, the trees that line it, all still except a cluster of charcoal smudges, animated. 

Turkeys, is how I read them. I find them here often, on this back route between Connecticut and Massachusetts, though I usually spot them on a hill just ahead. The road is mine alone so I slow to watch them full-on and they’re not turkeys at all, they’re deer, not a flock or a herd but a stretch, one in front of the next, across a rolling quarter mile. They move slowly, different creatures than the anxious hurried they’d be in full daylight, so I can almost feel their calm. I don’t stop, people are waiting for me, but I slow further, to allow what I’m seeing to settle into me.

I don’t let it rest. Minutes beyond the fields I’m trying to force the experience into the shape of an answer. If I was younger the answer might have been God, God’s love or grace or  great gift of creation. The calm morning moving into me might have been declared holy. In those days I found God where I wanted, and when I needed.

I don’t find God anymore. I don’t talk about it because I fear the words:  lack, loss, a shame, a sorrow. A falling away. I don’t need pity for what, for me, only is or, rather, is not. And still, I have been trained to seek. Days past the drive and into the new year before the search fades, before I allow the deer, the hills, the fields, the grey morning to be exactly what they were to me in those early minutes, which was everything.

Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash