The Comfort of a Tail’s Flash Along Treeline

When I met him for the first time several months ago, I briefly sat across from him at an Audubon meeting where he was the guest speaker and I told him that my favorite poem of his was the one about the man who turned into a deer.

Oh, “Native Species”, he said in his kind, charming way. What a nice smile. What a guy Todd Davis is. Immediately I laughed. Of course my favorite poem would be the one that warranted the book’s title.

I am very good at laughing at myself and I am very good at admiring things and being moved. I proceeded to tell him how much I loved magical realism and then I mentioned that we’re basically neighbors—that he lives just over a mile away from me as the crow flies. I didn’t tell him that I once read about how crows don’t exactly fly in straight lines and that the idiom should be “as the goose flies.” I didn’t tell him because it might have been incorrect and I was in the company of really good birders.

In the current timeline I live in, magical realism is necessary. When hate-mongering is knitted into our fabric, I need the neighborhood gentle giant to hand me a bouquet of flowers held between his fingertips. Where logic is discouraged, I need for my house to float away via millions of balloons to a faraway land. Where truth is manipulated, I need a gigantic, smoking caterpillar to tell me what’s what. In a world where a man is celebrated for saying horrible things about women, I need for a man to turn into a skittish deer.

The poem “Native Species” starts with the image of a man looking at paintings of deer online. The paintings conjure for the man the sensations and fluidity of hunting a deer in a landscape of multiflora rose and briar. To navigate within such a relentlessly thorny landscape is to develop a kinship with it. Like Sisyphus’ hands creating grooves in the boulder, a hunter blazes a path leaving nothing behind but footprints. In a way, to hunt the deer on the mountain is to, in a way, become the deer on the mountain.

Weeks ago, a friend of mine informed me that Todd Davis would be doing another poetry reading alongside his son, also a poet. This struck just a tinge of envy in me as a person who does have loving, hard-working parents but they’re not beacons in the realms of art, poetry, or the sciences—the things I feel passion for. Self-taught and having always navigated the briars of my passions alone, my parents often pause and ask me How do you know these things? My father, incredibly intelligent and always in his own world, sometimes led our way into the woods. My mother, very smart and emotionally intelligent, always worked hard, sometimes allowing herself some downtime to read best-selling novels. A green thumb, she planted annuals every year, turning our postage stamp yard into a secret garden. I am no doubt the product of two people who conceived me on a bed of pine in the Allegheny National Forest. It was their passion that was passed down in reciprocity. Otherwise, I am mostly self-taught.

Of course a poet would have a poet son.

In the poem, the hunter labored with a meat saw, embodying the art of loving what one kills. Like something straight from a Robin Wall-Kimmerer book, the hunt is thanksgiving. The hunt is reciprocity. And in the poem, hunting season slips into winter, a landscape where a lucky person can find a shed antler like a crown removed before sleep.

I underlined that line in the poem for several reasons. Because deer do wear crowns, don’t they? Because the hunter and the poet imagine deer not just as kings, but kings that requires rest and safety in the confines of briar and snowdrift. Because of the word sleep, and how this poem—so narrowly conjuring similarities between the deer and hunter so far—is soon going to enter the dream-like, magical reality of a man turning into a deer.

Living a good life thus far, I imagine magic for myself. How about no longer commuting those precious 70 minutes for work four days a week. How about no longer needing to work 40+ hours per week. How about winning the lottery I never play. How about the Chronos I live in expanding beyond 24 hours so that I can give time to all my passions and loved-ones every single day. How about actually, really helping people. How about actually, really helping the earth. How about not needing to sleep. How about no more divisiveness. How about a president who reads books and talks about it. How about guiltlessly spending an entire day just watching one flower bloom. How about people walking into the woods where all the mirrors are.

Now imagine the hunter in the privacy of his bathroom, under the fluorescent light. Trimming a nail, he began to suspect something. Slowly, our friendly hunter is animorphing into a wide-eyed cervid. And just as slowly, and even more beautifully, his beloved wife and children allow it without question. In the poem, provider becomes prey. Man becomes kept. The present father and husband becomes the elusive shadow in the margins of reality and fantasy. The daughter plants for him a garden that he can ravage. His daughter still rides his shoulders, but in a different way. During rifle season when a shot echoes through the valley, they call out his name, waiting for the comfort of a tail’s flash along treeline.

I get anxious and silly around folks I admire. The huge, wide world that I believe I live in shrinks under the sky of their existing across from or next to me. This doesn’t intimidate me; it fascinates me. My heart flutters and I become skittish, doe-eyed. I navigate within the shadowy margins of a gathering, always knowing the escape route. As I grow older, I have settled into this thorny bed of self-awareness. As I grow older, I am owning myself more, knowing that admiring and laughing is what I do best. So happily, I will tell these knowledgeable, interesting people that I have no idea what they’re talking about. Happily, I will poke fun at myself. Happily, I will listen to anecdotes, ask for more clarity, and butter someone up who deserves a good buttering.

At the recent father-son poetry reading, I sat in the margins with a friend who, when she thought of poetry, she thought of Shakespeare and the like. She had no idea that poems could be little stories. So magical, so real, to be side-by-side with someone who opens up my world, and I open up hers. So magical, so real, to watch the son recite his poetry and what moved me most during the entire event was watching the father, sitting at a distance within the audience, smiling at his son.

In the poem, the hunter—now a deer—stamps his feet in the darkness of the ecotone. The ecotone, that liminal threshold between field and forest, magic and reality, love and apathy, man and deer. When a deer stamps their feet, they are sounding an alarm of danger and fear. However, the vulnerable, scared deer’s heart rests when finally he sees the face of his child in the glowing window.