Digging in Escondido, and: Hunting Doves at Matador

DIGGING IN ESCONDIDO / Walter McDonald What the tornado didn't spin away they bulldozed onto trucks and dumped. Now like a miracle they can walk across the canyon on dry land. Snakes they've shot for years are buried deep by bricks and screens they once called home. Dammed up, the Escondido still runs dry. What little rain soaks in like stars. No one here cares how canyons formed or what lies hidden under last storm's junk. Only the museum could call you back, cursing the heat in cutoffs and helmet, digging the canyon down to caves and creekbed for clay bowls, arrowheads, the chalk skulls of dinosaurs and men. The odor of grain slides down from stockyards. Throughout the day you climb out of the dig to plains so flat you curse whoever wastes a canyon. You lived here young, you grew up running, climbed one day full of rage down this canyon to a cave, a sudden thunderstorm crashing the canyon you rescued from the same four walls of school. Doesn't that excuse this broken glass, these schoolhouse bricks red as your knuckles rapped for staring past windows at some airplane's loops? Can tornadoes bury dull hours so deep you'd never leave again? Say yes and leave it if you must. You dreamed of wings, ran miles chasing army gliders drab as coffins training to crash on French fields flat as lakes. On land this flat no wonder people fly. Sailplanes glide overhead like pterodactyls 18 · The Missouri Review your pick sets free. Their long wings flash, they pivot, they climb on currents dry as caves. Your pick scrapes down on bricks scattered like an aircrash. Raw knuckles digging up your life find sticks like castanets of rhythm band, the hours in school better than windows. Dead teachers write equations in a sky filled with wings. Whatever they assign today you'll do. But first climb out of the canyon where you've always lived and wave to brothers soaring layer by layer up from the plains on the last, the longest thermals. for Richard Hugo Walter McDonald The Missouri Review · 19 HUNTING DOVES AT MATADOR / Walter McDonald As long as I sit here mourning doves swirl down over mesquite trees and sage to this brown tank already simmering. Since dawn I've shot sometimes two in a row, pump, pump, the second stumbling in mid-air before the first one plops. The next dove jukes past like a sabre jet through flak, side-slipping, up down up up fast as a bat. This kind I have to lead blind, blink and squeeze, it's only luck if I hit it. Brought down by thirst others swish in, their backward sweep of wing telling my trigger doves, not the illegal hawks their size and color, which singly strut past from time to time as if daring me. Once, dreaming of doves I squeezed too swift and saw a hawk spin in and splash. Stunned, it floated, feathers splayed, 20 · The Missouri Review then flapped its good wing wildly to the one tree in the tank, trunk bark sloughed away, twigs tangled in the water like brush. The hawk fluttered up, flailing for balance, dripping, the only sound in ten thousand acres. Beak open, crouched in branches thick as cobwebs, it watched me aim, blood pumping out each breath, talons squeezing the last branch it had come to. I think it saw the blast. That night, dove breasts darker than hearts were safe as mushrooms, the wine sauce smothering all hint of wildness. Walter McDonald The Missouri Review · 22 ...