WEBVTT

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I'd like to read
a couple of poems

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also from this collection
that's from a series

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that I've been doing
also, Hunting Poems.

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I don't know how y'all
do here in Tucson.

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But I suspect there's
hunters in Tucson.

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Anyway, hunting
is a weird thing.

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It's very difficult for me,
being part Native American,

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to condemn hunting outright.

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Because there is a
relationship there.

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But at the same time, I
wouldn't want to do it.

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Anyway, these are a series
of love poems to a hunter.

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And the first one is "Buckshot."

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And it begins with an old
Irish folk song, the lyrics

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from an old Irish folk song.

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"For now it is September,
and the killing has begun."

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"Buckshot."

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"My man wants to kill.

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He longs to shoot
his guns into the air

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sacs of still steaming breath.

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He tries to heave himself
into the site and narrow anger

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into a new dimension.

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My Love wants to stun the living
daylights out of creation,

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hang the dead rough
in keening wind,

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and break the wings
as rigor mortis sheds

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the feathers easily into
his fine and slender hands.

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In the season of the dark spill,
I see him shiver on the reel

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and feel his dog's tense
happiness, smell the blood

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spore of his wolf and hair
matted and close as after sex.

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His toes are cold as
bullets in the blind.

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The siren of his eyes is
taut as catgut as he waits.

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My sullen angler
performs his task

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with the tension all
his own as if in sleep.

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His murmured smell of breath
escapes the life of smoke

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within the mist.

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He gives the added
slack, pulls the line

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in sentences in the
Morse code of fish,

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a diddled dance of prey.

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He settles for my cold
blood but counts the night

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before his holiday of death."

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