The first breath October turns on its tongue
like wine cooled by a mountain stream, is
winter. Sounds -- of ice crunching underboot
as you trudge slowly northward among the junipers,
among the white-haired pine, and tall grass trembling
in the wind -- hang in the air. Your breath
steams the glasses on your face. Your hands
grip the hungry stock of your rifle as you say
to your son, "This is not a game ..."
who walks beside you. Who pauses to admire
the last claws of autumn that cling tightly
to the bent trunk of an elm (patched oddly, you think,
into pine). When a doe spills
across the snow. You bolt the rifle to your shoulder,
aiming,
and squeeze the trigger: one shot,
you tell yourself, to break the spine, or like a mole
to burrow into her
throat. "Clean is what matters," you told your son. And
the doe will tumble deathward, like an acrobat ... . There
is no net to save you, woman, you mouth without word.
But the doe turns upon you.
Her brown fur -- mottled feathers --
spreads from her, as she owns you to her large brown eye:
the trapeze falls inches short of your fingers; your rifle
falls. And you
describe the slow spiral homeward. |