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THE FIRST SUNDAY OF HUNTING SEASON
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
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THE FIRST SUNDAY OF HUNTING SEASON Hunting season. Busy nude clubs in MN and ND looking for good girls to make big $$. Hunting season is here! No experience necessary. — employment notice in a Minneapolis weekly The men are out in their orange cuirasses. The good girls are rehearsing their moves. In the pews of the churches in small towns are women, with their eyes on their prayer books, the flurry of pages like a snicker of ash. To kill, we are told, is a boy’s rite of passage (though into what new terrain I never could fathom because I loved a soldier once who was lost forever inside the country of his own body); but it’s why, at this moment, there are men and boys perched in blinds, discussing the nuances of firearms. Poets, of course, butcher nothing but their own ideas: the words on the page are the duff and the epitaph of an impulse in its first perfect stirrings. So, bless the shoulders we lean against such language; and the heart’s four neighbourhoods, its exclusive, gated communities: bless them. Bless the deer that slide, over and over, out of the hunter’s sights and saunter, out of common sense or instinct, onto private land 77 and so flaunt themselves in the open all season long. And bless the good girls from Minnesota and North Dakota dancing naked after dark for men their fathers’ age, men who return to their motels and their campers with a loneliness nothing in this life will kill. Bless the boy so bewitched by the black ink pots of a deer’s hooves that he cannot fire his rifle. Bless the bullet that jams in the chamber. Bless the grave of every poem. 78 ...