Evensong (O, Bewildering Picture)
- Evensong (O, Bewildering Picture)
The animal shelter is on one sideof the trailhead, the zooon the other. Beware of rattlerssunning on the path. Beware,
this looks like easy allegory.When my son told his classabout the rabbit in our yard,one boy said how much he’d like
to shoot it. Look at these ordinaryhouses: during last summer’s eclipsethey charged strangers hundredsjust to sack out on a couch. O tourist,
interloper, imagined into profitablepest. Inside the shelter are too manysummer kittens. I keep walking bythough I know what happens
to them next. O dumb cricketswho fell for it when the sunwas covered, how you beganto chirp. This trail circles a park,
where what I feared was a gunshotturned out to be a backfiring car.Turns out that envelope from collectionswas for the Hidden Pictures magazine
I forgot I’d ordered for my son. Turns outit was the fireworks we heard last nightthat ended up being the gun. If onlythe worst we could do in our confusion [End Page 140]
was miss the hidden moonin the picture laid out before us,or sing an evening song. Turns outthose shut-down Walmarts
are in the business of holding children.The plans to release them are a mess.They will pour into and infest: thatlanguage is meant to obscure
to us what is human. These rustlinggrasses offer up cottontails,scurrying mice. Still I imagine a snakeis waiting to strike. What a luxury,
only imaginary harm. Soonthis trail will be expanded. The planis to surround the whole city.And what then will we imagine:
pleasant greenbelt, moat,an impenetrable wall? Comb againthrough this bewilderingpicture. O wild bear who scaled
the walls into the zoo—eventuallyshot, tranquilized, and removed—for a moment, no one knewwhere you belonged. I have paid
to see the animals and I haveseen my son, his reflection imposedon top of them. There was the sunclimbing the sky behind him. Wait,
no, in the picture glass I saw the moon,hiding in a strange boy’s hair. [End Page 141]
bethany schultz hurst is the author of Miss Lost Nation, winner of the Anhinga Poetry Prize and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2015 and in journals such as the Gettysburg Review, Narrative, and Plough-shares. Recently named a Literary Arts Fellow by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she is an associ ate professor at Idaho State University.
