Here's my hunting story.
I did read this one last night.
This is my hunting story about-- there's
a line in here that says, "I'm not a savage, I'm not crazy,
but come from a small town where I was no beauty dressed
in a windowless room.
And even then the boy next door knew the scar far
down my spine."
And I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, which,
the peeping Tom capital of America.
So Pete was very nice when we moved into the Poetry Center.
There's the room with the French doors that you can look into.
He said, well, I guess you don't want to stay in there.
So we didn't even have to flip for it.
Anyway, this is my Halloween poem,
my excursion into Keatsian Gothic, about a woman
alone in a hunting--
in a cabin during hunting season.
This poem, I have to say, I mean, now it's really,
it brings catharsis and it's sort of a joke to me
when I get to the meat-meat.
But it was written out of pure terror.
I mean, I lived in apartments in the Lower East
Side of New York.
I lived a lot of places alone.
I lived in cabins alone, and so forth.
But I bought this house up near the Selway Bitterroot,
which is a place that Pete is writing about.
It's a wilderness area.
It was right at the beginning of hunting season.
I was a graduate student and a TA.
And I go in, and I teach classes, and take classes.
And there was this guy in my class
who was enormous and wore--
I think he was a welder.
And he wore steel toed boots and he wrote these stories about,
and then I went to the 7-Eleven and I shot the face
off the Kotex box.
And I'd go, oh please, don't let this guy
and find out where I live.
And I'd get home at night and there were
guns going off in the woods.
And I go, I know he's out there.
I know he's out there.
So this was written out of that.
"Nightjar."
"I worked the whole day naked, bees and dry knapweed,
aspen leaves jingling on their stems,
a forest of copper earrings.
I slit zucchini, nail the green skins to dry,
split kindling, tweez splinters from my wrist.
Nothing in daylight can harm me.
At 5 o'clock the flies are quiet,
blades come to life in the pine forest.
I gather the afternoon's tools, try them on--
hatchet, maul, rusty nails--
lock them away.
Locked, I say to the door behind me.
Locked, the day is over.
In an hour, the windows go black as mica,
two lights flicker far down the road.
They move in a triangle, lips to fingers,
the cigarettes of hunters.
One bends over a dead animal, its throat curled open.
He carves out a broadhead of five blades, shaped for bear.
It's a mistake.
A neighbor's goat.
My own imagination.
A car moving deep in the valley.
I write my mother.
She writes back.
"You are my rare bird.
You must build blinds and hide behind them."
Rare?
I'm a raven that flaps about, tasting carrion.
When I enter a room, the air wrinkles in my hands.
I'm not a savage, I'm not crazy, but come
from a small town where I was no beauty, dressed
in a windowless room, and still the boy next door
knew the scar far down my spine.
It's midnight.
I sit by a flame and listen.
Rats clack in the kitchen, traps raised on their necks
like pleated Elizabethan collars.
Truce.
I want no more tools.
Steel is awkward in my hands.
The moon half risen illuminates new clouds.
They belly across the timberline like dark cats.
I chose this cabin on the lip of a canyon surrounded
by fierce winds.
In summer, I live on inky caps and blackberries.
Now it is hunting season.
The men dress in bright coats and their boots chant
meat, meat.
I pull my hair back like an old woman.
I cannot dance in my own cabin.
I wear a loose kimono and black bedroom slippers.
I do not move my hips or shoulders."