TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I live in central Ohio, where deer are a part of life, even in the suburbs. My parents still live in the house I grew up in, which is in a densely populated area — residential streets and cul-de-sacs and strip malls. There is a creek running behind the house that leads to a reservoir, though, and wildlife tends to follow the water. So it’s not unusual to look out my parents’ back windows to see a buck standing in the yard, or a heron, or a red fox. 

My house is in another suburb about twenty minutes from my parents and closer to downtown Columbus, and I have walked outside to get into my car in the morning and seen, in my nextdoor neighbor’s yard, a group of whitetail deer. They may have followed Alum Creek into my town, but in my neighborhood they are hemmed in by busy roads they must cross to get back to the woods and the water. It always makes me nervous and scared for them, to see deer in neighborhoods. The odds of one being struck by a car are just too high.

I’ve always had a sweet spot for deer, maybe because my father was a hunter when I was a child. We had not one but two deer heads in our house; one hung in the living room for many years despite my mother complaining about it to my father. No one wanted to watch TV with a taxidermied buck staring at them with plastic eyes. When I moved out of the house, my father claimed my old bedroom as his den, and the deer moved there. Everyone was happier. Well, maybe not the deer. 

Living in this part of the country, you learn to keep an eye out while driving, especially during certain times of the year. You learn where you’ll likely see deer, and where you need to slow down and keep your eyes peeled to the sides of the road, along the treeline, in case one darts out in front of you. Living here, you also get used to seeing them lying on the side of the road. No, I take that back. I still wince when I see a dead deer on the side of the road. I’ll never get used to it.

Today’s poem moves quietly and deliberately, the way a cautious deer might walk from the shelter of the woods into a clearing. I love the sounds of this poem, and its pacing.

Whitetail in the Rain Moving About
by Melissa Ginsburg

to lure the deer install the salt

acquire the sack of corn and scatter 

devise a thirst lodge hope red clover

chicory orchard grass give them

fruit in the rainstorm give them

such a mineral they cannot turn from you

give them the pea plant the acorn

the encounter

the encounter you want

the meadow embouchure

paint the orchid scent on the bottoms 

of your shoes and walk into the herd

manager and agitator

herd of unshed velvet

“Whitetail in the Rain Moving About” by Melissa Ginsburg from DOLL APOLLO © 2022 Melissa Ginsburg. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.