Deer Hit

From its title alone, it is clear that “Deer Hit” uses figurative language and wordplay to convey a rueful, at times darkly comic, narrative illustrating both the consequences of bad decisions and the unavoidable imposition of bad luck. No comma or other punctuation indicates an inversion here, where “hit” might modify “deer.” Still, at first glance the title seems to refer to a hit deer, with the traditional syntax reversed. But Jon Loomis’s title purposefully invokes the colloquial, slang definition of “hit” as an execution, as if to suggest the young person in the poem fulfills the role of deer killer with responsibility and resignation, his unavoidable duty. Thus, from the title of the poem, the narrative’s central figure plunges toward destruction as the apotheosis of his character.

Second person narratives like “Deer Hit,” in poetry, novels, and even in some nonfiction works, mostly assume an understanding of a hypothetical “you,” who is neither the poet nor the reader. This particular point of view even distances the speaker from a place at the center of a narrative. Second person invites collegiality from the reader, an invitation to know how such things may be. In cases like “Deer Hit,” where a series of poor decisions result in various stages of harm, the second person point of view can read like an accusation, as it does in Line 1: “You’re seventeen and tunnel-vision drunk.”

The poem breaks into two narrative sections numbered 1 and 2, each a separate setting and mood. Part 1 focuses on the accident itself, unfolding with violence and terror, filled with action and peril like a horror movie. In the opening lines of Part 2, the father even comments how his teenaged child looks like “Night of the Living Dead” (Line 34).

The accident’s impact scatters; as with a real accident, until things stop moving the reader can’t tell if the car hit the deer at all—the “road full of eyeballs” illuminated in the car headlights (Line 6)—or if the swerve into the ditch injured only the driver. Present tense verbs and the second person perspective make the visceral sounds of the crash even more excruciating and intimate: “Glitter and crunch of broken glass / in your lap, deer hair drifting like dust” (Lines 9-10).

The slow motion, frame-by-frame pace imitates post-accident perception in bewildering detail. A severe facial injury comes across as both immediate and clinical, distanced (“…one eye half-obscured/by the cocked bridge of your nose,” Lines 11-12), since pain doesn’t come until 14 lines later: “Your nose throbs” (Line 26). Between realizing the broken nose and perceiving the agony, the driver gets out of the tilted car, finds the half-paralyzed deer in the road, listens to its cries of pain, waits for it to quiet, then places the mangled deer in the broken car.

The driver even manages to drive the car out of the ditch “somehow” (Line 22) and start home before returning to the broken nose. Noticing the car’s damage—“headlight dangling, side-mirror gone” (Line 25)—seems to remind the driver of his own injury. In Line 26 the pain surfaces: the broken nose and “something stabs/in your side” (Lines 26-27). The same confusion that led the driver to make the incredibly bad choice to bring the deer with him now causes him to envision the deer as something terrible and possibly supernatural. It's breathing, “shallow and fast” (Line 28) increases his urgency; when the deer “scrambles to life” (Line 29), he sees its face in the mirror “like a ghost” (Line 30). The second person narration becomes acutely relevant again as the deer “bites you” unexpectedly in Line 31, and “maybe you scream” in Line 32, as if the poem’s speaker isn’t the driver, wasn’t at the scene, and it really is the reader who was bitten on the shoulder by an angry deer.

Part 2 becomes a psychological relationship drama, where the aftermath of the accident provides a platform for the father-son relationship to reveal itself. Their alliance in shame and bewilderment brings an awkward consolation, a rocky but emphatic resolution as they work together to clean up what can’t be fixed, to occlude what can’t be erased.

The poem’s start establishes the driver’s “tunnel-vision” (Line 1) drunken stupor, adding to its characterization of mood by describing his “swerving” (Line 2) along the road “at 3:00 a.m.” (Line 3), a time simultaneously too late and too early for anything nice to happen. In contrast, the second line of Part 2 presents the father’s drunken aggression simply: “He’s had a few drinks and he’s angry” (Line 35). The present tense and second person—it’s “your father” in Line 34 just above—creates immediate, intimate tension. The situation goes beyond foreshadowing, setting the context for violence explicitly.

Rather than erupting with rage, the father adopts a tone of near-admiration, or at least awe. He makes a weak joke referring to the horror of the son’s appearance: “It’s Night of the Living Dead” (Line 37). Otherwise, his bewilderment reduces his speech to profanity (“Christ,” “Jesus,” and “Son of a bitch” in Lines 36, 40, and 41). He “circles/the car” (Lines 39-40), taking it in, then “drags the quivering deer” out for a closer look (Line 42) before heading to the shed and returning “lugging a concrete block” (Line 49). The verb choices paint a graceless picture; the deer’s end comes clumsily, without any respect or dignity. Even the driver’s poetic comparisons of the deer’s skin to “the color of wet straw, color of oak leaves” (Line 46) comes from a need to excuse his behavior: “what can you tell him” (Line 43). The driver never claims any authentic regret, maintaining the same awe the father’s actions reveal. Both respond to cause and effect with wonder. The reader may feel shame on behalf of either or both characters, but they both only seem to respond to their own ability to set actions in motion.

The driver stops short of expressing regret, though he claims responsibility for the damage he causes: “All your life, the trail of ruin you leave” (Line 52). In that final sentence, the driver omits the verb, leaving the nature of his action as a vacant space for the reader to fill. An inversion could complete the sentence as “you leave the trail of ruin.” But that construction casts even more doubt on the driver’s capacity for remorse. The reader cannot know for sure whether the driver experiences overwhelming shame, or overwhelming power.