Forgotten Ground Regained
Interloper
How faint was its shadow when first we beheldIn a trail-camera shot of a tree line at noontimeA shape most familiar emerge from the brush,Wandering, sniffing the wiregrass: to children,A marvelous vision; to most of us grown,Only shanks bearing backstraps and shoulder and loin.When it cast up a glance with a glimmer of interest,We scrapped our debate and the bets we all placedOver doe versus button-buck. Damned thing was neither:A deer with the face of a fully grown man.
It didn’t do much. In the daylight, it lazilyNibbled our cucumbers, nosed through our roses And loped through our pastures. It looked unconcerned.Though its weird mannish face held a flicker of promise,It never did speak. It was nothing more grand Than a human-faced deer, with a dull, vacant grimace,And ours, we supposed, was the only real caseEver found where a deer had the face of a man.
Were we truly so boring? No Bigfoot? No Mothman?No dragon-fanged beast could be bothered to stalk usOr drain all the life from our livestock and pets,Or menace our farmers, or frighten old cyclistsAnd city-soft ramblers on riverside paths?No wonder our young people yawned and moved out.At first, we made efforts. Our folklore collectorsTried asking it questions. It eyed them and farted.
The local commissioners met with the beast
On the edge of a field, where they found it excessively
Focused on grass. The greetings from schoolkids
It dutifully chewed. A dentist tromped out
To examine its habits, perhaps help it floss.
Our books held no precedent. Preachers were flustered:
No devil or angel was ever so trite.
A curious artist with canvas unsullied
Concluded he’d rather paint regular deer.
The “Man-Faced Deer” t-shirts had miserable sales.
We wanted to shoot it. But was it in season?
The state couldn’t say.
So that stupid, mute faceLeft us angry and rattled. The Internet slandered us.No one believed us. Then nobody cared,And the man-faced deer stayed, and we meant to returnTo the labors that nourished our land and our town.
Yet something did hear us, discerned our regretAnd unleashed its displeasure. We let the deer roam,But wherever it lingered, it left disarrayAnd the stroke of undoing. The stories spread fast:How the grass turned to ash when it grazed in their yard.How a grim little fig tree was finally thriving,Except for the fangs on the faces that sproutedWhere fruit’s meant to be. How it frowned when it kneltAt the wall by the graveyard, and wept for an hour.And those boys who went fishing, their boat came up empty,But then one of the boys turned up babbling a languageThat no one could fathom. My friend said his sheepStarted hiding in bushes and hissing at cars.The old disappeared from their porches and decks,And the remnant they left was like rain in our heads;It was miserable business remembering names.The rest became strangers. We strained to form words.
We should have been glad for the glimmering duskOn a red puff of sorghum, or the sight of a mountainThat looked like a duck egg got dropped from a ledge,Or the whiff of manure on a wet, pregnant field,Or the trill of a wren and the rustle of batsAt a gap in the attic, the gazing of snakesOver rats in the mulch. They were more than sufficient.
The ferry is sunken. The fields are bald.The old town hall and the houses around itAre crawling with ivy and eaten by weeds.Let vagueness reclaim them. We closed all the schools.Don’t tempt things further. Tape sheets on the windows,And double the bolt on the basement door.
Copyright © Jeff Sypeck, 2024
First Published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 5, Winter, 2025
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