léon pradeau

Growing antlers

—for Ulrich Baer, reading Deer Black Out (2024)

I was driven, & I was moved. Your book travels through identities at night, like deer eyes I saw glowing over a road in upstate Wisconsin, arresting. Your words keep coupling, two-headed four-eyed figures, awefright of these deer eyes, transpitched, everpresent, like your mother in these lines:

my mother was a

birdsilence asked me

to revisit pastures

Staying with you in mourning birdsilence: combinations of words over syntax—I remember another poem of yours, another word, “evilbeautiful”, I’m sure you didn’t just use it once, you hopeless romantic, watching the words and their mating rituals.

To you, words, bodies, and deers, “& nightspread mantled & dismantled”—are compositions, combinations: is this why we write so differently? The organic, immediate ways in which you feel things combining and growing inside and out. Identity, you say, is “trans-/literate.” What are you made of/what’s your composition?

I see horses & cowboys over long American plains. “I or my was word broken horse trotted syllable for noise”—did you write this anticipating that, one day, I would make you read David Wills’ Prosthesis, where he spends years (or pages, for years) with a line from Virgil: “quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum [the hoof strikes the dusty plain in a four- footed rhythm].” What’s the rhythm of your cowboy strut?

“A steeple or fences took away cowboys, molten horsefeathers extracting erotics”. Yes, a molten rhythm, self-incandescent, moltenblooming, autoerotic (apologies for trying my own composure/ition after you: I’m just reading

you compose in, were composed

you :: chiasmus, chiral

delicately knees into

the bee hive, dripped

auto

erotics you

refrain

[...]

infinite nest weaved

kingfisher or ocean—

blue deer

nudging the blue

antler that pathways

residue recurs.

You’re running in blue highway lights, carrying a (dis)mantle of snow and bees—I compose you, was composed (by reading you). This, an effect of repetition: just like the words of the poem are never coupled quite right, antlers are recurring objects. Each winter we shed, each spring we grow again. Just survived another winter, and your book comes out with the antlers. Testosterones and we “refrain”, but in French it means: tune, chorus. Each spring we (at)tune, hope we keep singing together.

repetition to recover

that hunched you, passed down

mountains careening

valleys humbled in shadowhums

Long long valleys of your South & your Europe—I see you passing by, rehearsing choreographies. Repeat them, repeat them, my exterminating angel: perhaps someday, something unlocks in your motion. Hunched over your horse, over years of mourning & longing, careening—perhaps, someday, the shadowhums will quiet.

Until then, cowboy, I’ll pass you down, I’ll carry you in or with, humming your composure, growing antlers with you. And when we shed, our bones will be like “chords / we never severed”. The end of your book is but a beginning.

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Statement of Homage

Ulrich Baer is a poet I've been following for years. When he showed me his Deer Black Out (Red Hen Press, April 2024), it struck me as a great book—but also as deeply personal and formative, for myself. I tried writing a book review at first, but what I really wanted was to thank him for this experience and to try to live with his words for a moment.

Ulrich Baer

Ulrich Baer was born in Georgia and grew up beneath Southern power plants. He received his MFA from Brown University in 2017. Among other books, he has a poetry chapbook with Magic Helicopter Press (Holodeck One, 2017), a science fiction chapbook with Essay Press (At One End, 2020), and a full-length book with Apocalypse Party (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, 2021). He has been included in journals such as FENCE, Baest, and Bone Bouquet. He loves horses and lives in Paris - or elsewhere. 

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