trophy and depart
With its antlers dangling low
Kind of gruesome, but hey!
That’s what hunters do with their kill.
Gotta keep things realistic.
I’ve got to get the hunter and the maiden together.
Let’s see …
The stag could wander into the garden,
start in eating the herbs and flowers.
The maid cannot shoo it away.
Then the hunter shoots! Fwit!
Dead deer in the peonies.
A medieval meet-cute.
Blood corrupts the chaste white lilies
Gore now waters sage and thyme
But a poet with the sillies
Might just be a greater crime!
OK. Garden scene not working.
Hmmm …
I remember one dark night
Dad shook my brother and I awake,
dressed us, two boys half asleep,
and took us coon hunting.
Raccoons.
We were in a dark woods at night
with his hunting friends.
They all shone flashlights into the trees.
Whenever they saw two yellow eyes
reflecting the light, they’d blast away,
and their coon dogs would make a great howl.
I don’t know why Dad bagged raccoons.
Mom wouldn’t cook them.
He never ate them.
And he wasn’t Davy Crockett.
He didn’t need a coonskin cap.
Well … so my hunter’s tracking stags in a garden.
Stupid.
Maybe I should get the maiden to the forest instead.
Maybe to find that one last flower
that doesn’t grow in her garden.
This last request from dying mother:
Just one rose of purest red
In her youth a handsome lover
Lay beside her in the clover
Gave her roses; now he’s dead
Hmmm…
Kind of lost my train of thought.
Lost my taste for guns, too, eventually.
Really, I’d rather grow roses.
My brother didn’t, though.
He buys up guns when he sees a bargain —
more of them than he knows what to do with.
He never really took much to hunting.
His home’s in a clearing surrounded by woods,
his neighbors not very close by.
He nailed an old trash can lid to a tree
and he shoots at that with his guns.
Just like a stick in the river, same idea.
But back to the poem:
Comes the maiden to the forest
For the rose she cannot grow
She would place in mother’s hand
A rose beside her wedding band
Small lives end with little show
But how to get a rose garden into the woods?
Maybe some pheasant ate some roses,
flew off into the forest,
and pooped out the seeds in a glade.
Can roses grow from seeds?
I’ll Google that tomorrow.
Sheltered is this heav’n-grown garden
In a forest glade unknown
Planted to the Lord’s own plan
Tended by an angel’s hand
There are finest roses grown
Now to crank up the tragedy.
A sick mother won’t be enough.
Perhaps the hunter, tracking the stag,
sees some movement, looses an arrow,
and hits the girl in her breast
just as she spots her perfect red rose.
It’s kind of like “Polly Von”, the old folk song —
a hunter shoots an arrow at a swan,
but kills his girlfriend Polly instead.
I’ll use a stag instead of a swan —
Less poetic, but more meat
and a better head to mount afterwards.
I’ll call the maiden Ann Rag, after Raggedy Ann.
Poor Ann Rag, shot for a stag
Not the trophy he’d desired
Still, her head was more than fair
Many good points she had there
And a rack he’d much admired
Rats! My mind’s drifting again.
Scratch that last stanza.
Once, hunting with my dad,
I shot at a stick across the river
with my rifle, while I was alone.
I missed.
Then I heard a sort of shrill crying sound
in the woods beyond the river.
For days I was haunted by the thought
that my stray bullet had wounded some girl
lost to my sight among the trees.
She was crying in pain
while I slunk away, looking for Father,
telling myself again and again
that it was some bird I’d heard
giving out a warning cry.
Today I fully believe that it was a bird.
I only half believed it then.
So our maid’s in a garden in the forest this time.
The hunter shoots! Fwit!
Mommy don’t get no flower.
As he nears his aimed-at prey
Shock and sorrow grow within
A rose now brings his tears to flood
A red rose made from maiden’s blood
And his arrow is the stem
‘Course that’s the problem with weapons —
guns even more than bows.
If you have them, you always, always
kind of want to use them.
And you often hit what you’re aiming at.
It’s just you can’t predict what,
in some sudden blunder or dark mood,
you might be aiming at tomorrow.
Guns are a little like chocolate bars.
They’re nice to think about,
kind of tempting, a little addictive.
I put them away, out of sight,
and I can resist them for days,
but they’re always there,
always calling me.
I keep chocolate bars in the cupboard,
but I’ve never kept a gun.
So, in the “Polly Von” song,
the hunter is pretty torn up.
“I’d always intended
that she be my wife!” he wails.
Well, I’m sure he intended
doing something with her.
Blue as monkshood are her eyes
Corn-silk-yellow is her hair
He stops the bleeding with his fingers
While his gaze upon her lingers
On her features, young and fair
So now he’s smitten by a dying girl,
bleeding out her last drops.
It’s kind of like that old movie Laura,
only this guy’s not the detective,
he’s the killer.
The last time I stayed with my brother,
he was troubled by raccoons.
They were eating the food in his dog pen
and digging up his plants.
He set out some traps.
The raccoon goes inside after food,
and can’t get back out again.
The next day his trap had a tenant,
cowering back in a corner.
My brother picked up the trap,
got in his car, and drove down the road.
He released it far from his house.
The next day, Sunday, another one caught;
but this one growled and hissed and clawed.
My brother went back to the house, for a rifle,
and he shot that animal dead.
Shot it right there in the trap.
Then he walked off into the trees
with the trap and his gun and a shovel.
My brother’s no hunter, as I have said.
A man of g
ood humor, not hasty or cruel.
A man who that day saw something dangerous;
and he saw, too, an easy solution.
A guy with a gun and a shovel,
and a quiet woods he could bury things in.
Would he’d never trailed the stag
Would his bow had split in twain
Would he’d never seen her face —
Cruel end to so much grace —
Would his tears brought life again!
So the song’s hunter goes back to daddy,
wailing about poor dead Polly Von.
The next day he’s off by a lake,
still sobbing away,
when a swan glides by.
And he just watches it.
Makes no attempt to shoot it.
Somehow I think the swans were safe
around this hunter from then on.
He probably took up shooting pheasants.
Well, my hunter’s torn up, too;
full of regret and despair
and frustrated sexual desires.
He’s not had much rest,
and he’s not at his best:
In evening light by flowing Arden
Antlers lift with sudden start
The stag now sees the hunter’s quiver,
Bow and arrows, wash downriver
Never more to pierce a heart
My hero is long past the point
where he can toss his bow in the river
and trot off to join Hunter’s Anonymous.
The guy is a bit suicidal by now.
It’s all quite pathetic and very dramatic —
and damned if it isn’t long past my bed time!
The hour has come, ready or not,
to drown this whole thing in the river.
Beneath dark waters raven locks
Swirl ’round coat of forest green
Two grey eyes no longer weeping
Coldly all their sorrows keeping
No more is the hunter seen
The End.
I’ll read it over later, and kick myself twice
for being a fraud and a failure,
and mostly for being a fool.
Best to save that exercise for the morning.
Right now I’m just thinking sleep, and also
it’s a good thing I don’t own a gun.
August 28, 2013
Gnat Theology
While walking this morning, admiring the sky,
A gnat collided with my left eye.
Given the bug was quite small and that
The world is quite large, then why did the gnat
Pick out that one exact spot to fly at?
The best explanation that I could advance
Was putting it down to some random chance.
But it felt more personal, like there could be
Some powerful being that I can’t see
Aiming that damned little bug right at me!
I could invent a whole theology
Were a God sits in judgment on all He can see;
A heaven of wonders where righteous folk lie;
A hell far below where the dubious fry;
Just to explain a gnat in my eye.
My gnat catechism would draw back a curtain,
Put shine on existence, make life less uncertain.
But if God sees all sinners in every nation
Then pokes at me with a small irritation,
I’m thinking it’s certain He’s got me marked down
For realms not of glory, but realms underground.
I don’t mind a gamble if odds are the same,
But these dice are loaded, so why play the game?
I’ll wipe at the gnats with my
Her Life Is On This Table and Other Poems Page 7
