So. You really can make sense. Who'da thunk it?

I like this. The interesting language and musical progression that have always made your work interesting remain, with the addition of an underlying subtext—dare I say it, a subject—that is well served by your linguistic constructions.

You worry that you lapse into prose, an observation I've made of some of your earlier pieces. Not here. The lines are tight, the images sharp and crisp, and with one exception, there are no flabby abstractions. I'll get to that in a minute.

I'd pay close attention to where you've placed the line break between your first and second lines. Study it a bit, until you figure out why it's so effective, more so than your other line breaks. Keep in mind that the line, and where it's broken, it the single most important distinction between poetry and prose. Nothing similar exists in prose, and the potential to engineer deeper meaning into your lines, without actually taking us by the hand and literally telling us what you think, is an opportunity too often wasted.

Note the words omnipresent and indiscernible. Having just provided us with a wonderful image that provides all we need, tacking on those interpretative words suggests a lack of confidence in what you have accomplished. Besides, any reader who needs the image explained isn't smart enough to be reading your stuff anyway.

I was once told, in a critique of one of my stories, that the word suddenly is never justified. I resisted the advice and even resented it, which is why I ultimately accepted it. You should as well.

Other than those two blips in the first stanza, the language is elegant. So too, the content, though I think you've sold the poem short. In the final three lines, manage to do what poetry can do so effortlessly and prose virtually never: you take a quantum leap in context, setting, and tone as your linguistic camera pulls back and shows us a much larger space, all the while keeping it organically fused to what has come before. This is good. However, you need to revisit your deer. At the end, they are as they were at the beginning: deer, nothing more, nothing less, portrayed, but not exploited for deeper meaning. I've often said that a poem should never be about what it's about. In your case, you don't want your poem to just be about deer, particularly when you've already set up so many other ideas to bounce off of: dust, Christmas...

I don't know what I would suggest; it's not my poem, after all. But you need to decide what the poem is really about, and allow the deer to be the metaphor that gains access to those deeper structures.

You have a good piece in the works here.