Deer Lit: Every Night Is Halloween, Part VI

A student asked about Rick Bass' "Antlers." He had to write about it for another class. "What's it about?" he asked. It was a fast break between two classes: 19 students streaming out, 20 streaming in. In 10 minutes of prep to reset, what could I tell him?

If setting in a story is a often a metaphorical cue related to theme, "Antlers" has something Halloweeny about it.

"It's about animals as masks for people," I guessed. The characters have a Halloween party at which everyone straps antlers to their head. There's a woman who can't be alone and moves from man to man in the small town but refuses intimacy with the bow hunter. Is he hunter or prey? The narrator, who is not the bow hunter, has his heart torn apart when she leaves him, just as--in a different scene--the bow hunter explodes the heart of a buck. 

Monsters everywhere. Monsters who hunt monsters. "Look at the bowhunter's face on the final page," I say. He said he would and moved against the current of the incoming class.

But something stuck in head. It was those antlers that made me remember the title poem of Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap. It's a poem in a cycle that turns, but what I love about this poem is the turn from the self at a moment when many other writers would have indulged the self. To love at this moment is a divine act.

Stag’s Leap

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet,
and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape, a ground
without a figure. Sauve
qui peut—let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns hung
where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
 clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

 Happy Day-20 of Poetry Month.