Deer hunt at Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge, and: Autumn Fire, and: Piano Hymn of Faces

Deer hunt at Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge

Killing is a form of our wandering sorrow.

—Rilke

I watched them all yearthrough binoculars, through a camera,through kaleidoscope lenses of spring, summer, fall.And I thought they looked familiar—paralyzed by headlightson the road's shoulder leading out to the ocean.

I did not understandwhy no amount of magnificationcould bring me close enoughas I watched themwading through brackish water,preening spartina grass,bristling skins of light.

I did not understandwhy anyone would want to killwhat I wanted to clarify; why, the dawn of the hunt, instead of deerhurtling through the marsh,trying to outrace the popping of riflesand the white flag of their own antlers—

I saw a watery forest swimming with refulgent children;I saw a bright field pulsing with fireflies and starsthat lighted and died and blinked themselves dead.The eye of the lighthouse went out overhead,and guns echoed the roar of the ocean pealing,debriding the earth, razing the shorewith the habit of sorrow.

Autumn Fire

We walk through fields of yellow stalks.We hunt in fields of mullioned light.We scare up birds near the candlewood treesand wings rise like flames in a foreshortened sky,fanning the field into autumn fire.

This is your sport, but I carry your birdsas they fly into bullets and the tightly coiled sunspringing open upon them and the day.One bird smudges against a shut window of sky.

This is your sport, but I carry your birdsas we follow the dog on a zigzag chaseto where the pheasant hides, crumpled and embarrassed by death,wearing a mask of blood as redand fresh as the morning. Cloudsform like bruises on the wind-battered sky. And I

I carry your birds. Your birds I carryin a bright orange pouch slung over my back.And the cadence of quarry thumps on my shoulder—feathers damp and heavy as wax,wings mute and folded.

Piano Hymn of Faces

O what shall I hang on the chamber wallsTo adorn the burial-house of him I love?

—Walt Whitman

Over and over I have the same dream:an empty farmhouse shorn clean by the sunand the sun a ripe field never to be mown.The twin door of my hands revealsa bare room marbled by light. Is thiswhere wind replaced blood in the heart?

Here: the windows of my eyes, my fingers,tassel with splintered light. Herean ache in the chambers of the wind—cannot gather, cannot follow, never, never.Here: a field of hollow reeds becomes a congregationfluttering cardboard fans;a flock of ecstatic hands;the piano hymn of faces;the rasp of feet shuffling through dry stalks;the whole field walking away.

She must have warned me—cut flower of grief—planting me, heavy-lidded,with the newly dead I love.I am so tired. Over and overI have the same dreamWeeping the same face as laughter.