David Baker (1954– )

Abstract Hyper Then a stillness descended the blue hills. I say stillness. They were three deer, then four. They crept down the old bean field, these four deer, for fifteen minutes—more—as we watched them in the field, in the soughing snow. That’s how slowly they moved in stillness, slender deer. The fourth limped behind the other three, we could see, even in the darkness, as it dragged its right hindquarter where it was hit or shot. Katie sat back on her heels. The dog held in his prints, or Kate held him, hardly breathing at first. Then we relaxed. Blue night descended our neighbor’s blown hills. And the calm that comes with seeing something beautiful but far from perfect descended— absolute attention, a fixity. I say absolute. It was stillness. In the books we gathered, the first theory holds that the condition’s emergence is most common at age eight, if less in girls than boys, or more vividly seen in boys whose fidgets, whose deficit attentions, like little psycho-economic realms, are prone to twitches-turned-to-virulence, anxieties palpable in vocalized explosions—though now we know in girls it’s only on the surface less severe,