Alicia Mountain's "A Deer Mistaken for a Statue of a Deer"

Thoughts on the caught breath.

A Deer Mistaken for a Statue of a Deer

There are deer in the suburbs

who know they don’t belong there

and know they can’t leave

After the time for flight

(and deer aren’t fighters to begin with)

we get still and wait for

a change or an end —

I keep thinking that

I will die with my eyes open

And how in the city I am afraid

to leave the laundromat and how

I don’t remember if I ever

put your black bra in the dryer —

When I was a hunter

I was never even a hunter then —

from High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press, 2018)

P.S. I noticed that the stanza breaks didn’t come through in the email post, so here is a photo of the poem:

---

There is not a single period in this poem. No hard stops, no endings. Everything is caught on the flat line of the em-dash, or left hanging the invisible space of the line break, or extended into the white space between two stanzas.

What I love most about this poem is what this movement allows for, what it offers in terms of the speaker’s willingness to engage with tangential thoughts, with doubt, with vulnerability. It’s that intentionality to be almost intentionless that I love about the use of punctuation and space in this poem. If a period is like a sutured wound, then an em-dash is the open wound, unhealed, left out in the sun, all blood and skin. Imagine if I continued writing the rest of these sentences without periods, just an em-dash to connect my thoughts. Imagine the openness that would ensue, all the doors left opened, the possibilities for continuing on, for turning back —

Mountain’s use of the em-dash in this poem is an act of permission. When you re-read this poem, notice the movement: from deer, to flight, to change, to death. And notice the even subtler movement, almost invisible, as the speaker moves from witness (“There are deer”) to communal participant (“We get still and wait”) to singular individual (“I will die with my eyes open”). In many ways, the poem enacts that deeply embodied sense of being outside of something and then moving toward it, until you are within it, and, by being within it, entirely your own self, maybe for the first time.

All of that motion is contained in the seeming-small space of this seeming-small poem. It’s allowed for by the generosity afforded by the white space, the em-dash, the desire not to close off the poem to the very permissiveness the poem requires. To think: how many times have I hard-stopped a poem into resolution? How many times have I finished a line and said there, that’s it, it can’t be any other way? When I read this poem, I am perpetually astounded at all it allows for, and the almost-gentleness required to offer the poem that much permission in the first place.

To speak more on what is happening in this poem is harder. This is one of those poems that renders a groan in me, a caught breath. Those caught breaths occur at the moments when the poem takes up the least space — the two couplets dangling in all that white space:

“I keep thinking that / I will die with my eyes open”

“When I was a hunter / I was never even a hunter then —”

The poem seems to be playing with that age-old notion of fight or flight. But that’s just a surface-level way to describe it. Beneath that tension, there’s something about violence, about complicity, about forgetfulness, about the brain and the heart living in this world of so-muchness.

I’ve realized, each time I’ve re-read this poem, that part of this poem’s magic is the way it, by virtue of its open punctuation, builds each image on top of the next. Each image is not cancelled out by the one before, but rather burdened, one on top of the other, accumulating weight. Life is like this, too. I don’t know the extent to which we realize it until we are there, caught in a moment of heaviness, not knowing where it came from until we remember where we come from.

The first stanza of this poem leaves me despondent for the deer: motionless, wanting so much and not being able to find it. But it is that second stanza that does the double work of reaching back to the first stanza while at the same time reaching into the humanness of the reader. That wild “we” just appears. Like a fucking pokemon. There it is. Hello. Deal with it. It’s here. Which means — if you allow yourself — that you are here too. You, the reader, are one of the we’s that waits either “for / a change or an end.” This moment in the poem is so risky. It is an offering for the reader to join in without an upturned hand. You, the reader, must take that “we” as you wish. You can deny it if you want.

But if you take it, you are met with something special. Because after that “we,” the poem turns and becomes immediately, without warning, in the same period-less sentence, a poem of immense vulnerability and immense specificity. The moment after you, the reader, read the “we,” the speaker uses the “I,” and all at once the world collapses into the singular, and, as such, expands. It is that stanza, the first first-person one, the one that reads “I keep thinking that / I will die with my eyes open,” that shatters me. Out of nowhere, the “I” comes, and I see the speaker — which, because I have been part of this poem as a “we,” means that I see myself — alone in the field, frozen, statuesque, not knowing what to do.

And then, as if that were not enough, the next stanza cements the specificity. The “I am afraid.” The “laundromat.” The “black bra.” The “dryer.” In a poem of vastness, this stanza places me so entirely in a world I know so well even if I have never been there. But I have. I know what it’s like to be afraid of something that may or may not happen. I know what it’s like to be preoccupied. I know what it’s like to put my quarters in the washing machine and forget if I ever took my dirty jeans out of the closet and put them in the bag to be washed. I know what it’s like to feel something both immense and vague while being engrossed in the specific. I know what it’s like to be scared that this life is my life. I know what it’s like to be scared that I am not who I am, or be scared that I am who I am. I know what it’s like, I am trying to say, to be alive when being alive means nothing more than being alive. The laundry every other week. The dread of what should not give me dread. The cold pizza on the counter. I haven’t called my mother in a long time.

A good poem — and I hesitate always to use the word good, because it means nothing — collapses the universal into the specific and then accordions the specific back to the universal again. The last two lines do this. They conjure up the mystery this poem alludes to, this feeling of tension, of being caught between breath and death, between want and reality, between nothing and something. When you were, you were not — that’s what this poem seems to say. But, in saying that, the poem offers up the alternate truth: when you were not, you were. And such, Mountain seems to articulate, is the nature of this world, this moment. You are, and you are not. You can’t be, and you can. You want to run, but you want to stay. You are forever in-between.

I like to think less about what a poem says than what a poem allows for. This is a generous poem, maybe not in what it is articulating, but in the way in which it presents itself. Its radical openness. Its empty space. This poem gives permission for the complexity of human thought, that inexplicable moment when you are walking and notice something — a discarded hamburger wrapper, a balloon five thousand feet in the air — and dwell not on the thing you notice, but on what such noticing offered you. Maybe a memory, maybe a notion.

I return often to the parenthetical line: “deer aren’t fighters to begin with.” I think humans are. But I think part of our nature as fighters involves fighting against our very nature to be fighters. As Levis (I know I quoted him last time) says: “A body wishes to be held, & held, & what / Can you do about that?” Maybe this poem is asking: How can you give in? How can you quit beating yourself up? How can you stand alone in a field and notice just the fact of you standing alone in a field, not the vastness of the field, not the horizon line, not what encroaches upon you in that moment? You say you are a hunter — why? Why not just be something else? You were never a hunter.

Maybe this poem is asking these things. Maybe not. But it ends without a period, which means it is still going on, unanswered, into the mystery of today, where we are, even or not even, wanting or not wanting, fleeing or not fleeing, just always —