Notes: The poem is set in a hunting camp on a winter night where the men admire the day’s kill. The archetypal scene is linked to human pre-history and the mythological constructs that identified the observed natural world.
After The Hunt
the deer head in the truck stared with black eyes at the men who stood around at the stars that pointed the sky the cold night air maintained it the frost had pricked its ears six bone points flashed six hunters laughed of all that passed that day this head was real and would stay their breath turned vapor in the air
the hunters had their time to kill in deer stands through the day the grass still flat where they outstood the cold, the dogs whose voices cracked the hills and flamed the frozen stream that ran the possum out and treed the coon, the pack that took the inner meat the bladder and the tepid heart their muzzles in the steaming dirt and licked the hands of men
the deer head with its eyes so black that could not see in mortal light the buck that leapt the stream that kicked and snorted blood shed its horns and head that men might say the hunt was good
the hunters stood and stomped their feet the cold was on them like the night the hunters stood like men of stone their weapons smeared with frozen blood the deer head fossilized that night and aged a thousand years the stones where hunters stood made constellations of the trees a great buck hides the stars so wide its antlers spread Orion rides the rolling sky his bow tight
Notes: The poem is set in a Sabbath prayer service where men are engaged in silent reading. The poem is written as a sestina, a classical form created in France in the 12-century. Instead of rhyme, the poem repeats line-ending words in a defined numerical pattern within each stanza.
In the Room of Prayer
In the room of prayer where men are standing silence is a shawl upon their shoulders, a supplicant’s bowl filled with their breathing, and the weight of words remains unspoken by swaying bodies whose lips are moving to a rhythm inspired in the core of their being.
Within the heart of every human being the precipice holds a challenge to our standing, our shifting foothold while the earth is moving. We carry unknown worlds upon our shoulders, compelled to this task by words unspoken, by the rise and fall of muffled breathing.
In the silence of our shallow breathing we hear the whispered prayers of being, the words repeated though still unspoken, the shadow of the tower no longer standing, the traveler beckoning from roadside shoulders, the empty space through which light is moving.
Our fingers on the prayerbook page are moving, touching words as lightly as our breathing. We search to prove the burdens we shoulder are substantial and can justify our being, can give us meaning beyond understanding through hymns unsung, through prayer unspoken.
Our strength is in mere words, a force unspoken yet unrestrained, like tree roots moving beneath the ground where we are standing, tree roots that surface through concrete walks, breathing deeply as swimmers, rising from the depths of being, like an unseen hand that rests upon our shoulders.
If wings could fan the air about our shoulders we would rise on thermals of words unspoken like towering cumulus, like glowing celestial beings, like sunlight, a golden flame ever moving in silent prayer, like the men slowly breathing in this temple made of earth, barely standing.
We pose with shoulders square, with steady breathing, yet our voices go unspoken, our being is not sound; we are but standing shadows upon a moving ground.
If I eat a salted herring before going to sleep then dream of drinking from a mountain stream, this is called wish fulfillment.
The Romans feasting gagged on feathers and threw up. They knew the secret of keeping a party going.
Nothing has changed. I write these words because there's no one here to talk, reading out loud in a voice I love to hear.
There are nights when my bed grows too large for sleep. Instead of sheep, I count faces. In the morning, a mockingbird screeches at two wooden pigeons, who time and again beat him to the bath.
Everyone who is not here, please raise your hands. If there is a sufficient number, I will recite a poem.