poetry
May 1st, 2010 | Issue seventy-one

The Deer Path

by Kathleen Ossip
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The Deer Path

Kathleen Ossip
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As I walked on the deer path, I reviewed, as is my long-standing habit, my prospects. If
I expect more, I wondered, will I get it? One deer sped by in a small, trucklike vehicle
and shouted FUCK! at me through the open window in an unmistakably cruel way. But
deer are gentle creatures, I thought, vegan all their short, placid lives.

The cruel deer had disrupted my reverie, but I wouldn’t let it put an end to my walk.
On I went, past the deer gardens and the deer mansions. Such luxury also seemed out
of keeping with what I knew of that modest animal, the deer.

On the lawns, fawns kicked and ran. I heard one buck fawn call his friend a FAG, in an
unmistakably cruel way. I’d read that certain deer have evolved genetically to live out-
side the herd, on the periphery, alert to approaching danger. The benefit to the com-
munity seemed obvious.

I continued down to the deer lake, a valuable expanse of azure. The breeze blew, cool-
ing the healthy, active deer bodies. Was the water warm, was the lake deep? I didn’t so
much as dip my toe in. Like the flash of a hoof, in the middle of my life, I knew that I’d
been asking exactly the wrong question.

contributor
KO
contributor

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Magazine Writing, the Washington Post, Paris Review, Poetry, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York, and she is the editor of the poetry review website SCOUT. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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