I’ve been thinking about deer, Tom. It’s probably unrelated, how so far I’ve hit only one deer with my car, surprising given the density of nights spent driving in and out of the snowy, drunken, two-laned, deer-clogged heart of Upper Michigan [related subjects: animal death, bad luck, social customs, irony, belonging to a place, bad decisions, bad behavior, Mary Gaitskill]. This was in New Mexico, last year. I was driving a rented cop car prototype, a glorious Crown Victoria. It’s an odd car to rent: huge, bench seating, no iPod jack, no satellite radio, no CD player even—these beasts are not meant to convey luxury exactly—but the tank hauls up hills. Driving back from a friend’s wedding at which I officiated (he is Quaker, she is Pagan; the ceremony was a goulash; I wore a Moroccan robe with nothing under it and felt self-conscious for a while until I didn’t; we performed Sappho courtesy of Anne Carson and jumped the broom) with my wife, we both were perhaps a little tipsy. There is a lot of dark in New Mexico. The road was straight and wide; there is a lot of high plain there too, though fewer drifters (they call them residents). Forty-five minutes still from Taos, where we were staying, I saw nothing (isn’t that always the case) until suddenly: the deer—a big one, male; it was too fast to count the points—crashed into the Crown Vic’s side. Bad luck, I suppose, or Foley’s sort of it. I don’t know how these things happen: what are the chances of a deer hitting a Crown Vic at what must have been full speed (I was at full speed myself).

I didn’t take it as a sign of anything. I pulled over up ahead. Of course I thought of that William Stafford poem. The car was untouched except for a touch of fur. The Vic’s a beast. The beast itself I couldn’t see; it must have run right back away, light reflecting off the surface of a lake. I’d like to think it was okay. I didn’t hit it straightaway. Rather, it broadsided me. Since it didn’t even leave a dent (we’d hope our deaths would leave a dent), perhaps it lived, a little bent. I don’t know enough about deer to say. Some nights you’re in a car in New Mexico with your wife, and then the world becomes a bigger place.