13 Ways of Looking at Dead Deer
After Wallace Stevens
1.
From the edge of a harvested field,
the only moving thing
was a shell
from the oiled dark of a gun.
2.
I was of 15 minds,
like a photograph of my stepfather
cocking his first trophy buck.
3.
Venison
from the deep freezer—
thawing.
4.
A stepfather and a stepson
are divided.
A stepfather and a stepson and a dead deer
are no less divided.
5.
Where do they meet:
the silence after
blowing a deer call,
the silence before
a distant reply?
6.
Camouflage filled the blind
with barbaric foliage.
Not a single shadow
crossed our line of sight.
Two kinds of silence
deadened the drive home:
disappointment and relief.
7.
O rural cul-de-sacs,
how can you wish them dead?
Can you not see the hoofprints
left here long before
our people arrived?
8.
DEER XING AHEAD—
light passes through
bullet holes
in the leaping silhouette.
9.
Where the deer dropped out of sight
marked the beginning
of one of his stepfather’s few prides.
10.
spotted
along the timberline—
two fawns
11.
He rode over Michigan
in a pick-up. Pothole—
the bound snout
lurched forward.
He mistook that for life.
12.
New snow has fallen.
Surely the trail its body drug
has recovered by now.
13.
The glass eyes,
mounted in his garage,
can no longer distinguish between our faces
through years of dust.
Tate Lewis-Carroll (they/them) is the author of What's Left (Finishing Line '23), a chapbook of haiku, Blind to the Prairie (forthcoming from Bottlecap), and has been nominated for the Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Award for an Individual Poem in 2023. Their work can be found in Hotel Amerika, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and other journals. Find them on Instagram @TateLewisCarroll.