Combing the naked soil one country
morning, my mammoth Pawpaw taught
me to spot an Indian arrowhead
amidst dun rocks, beneath the wheel
of crow chatter filling pine shadows
cast long like swords across buckbrush.
Imagine my hands, the buck
fever I would have felt (countryside
echoing rifle-blast) if we had shadowed
that day like Monacan hunters—their bows taut,
tracking under cover of corngrass, deer wheeling
from misfired arrows whistling overhead—
but instead, around noon, we simply headed
back to his pickup. I made sure he buckled
his seatbelt as the trucks’ bald wheels
hauled us further from Pungo county,
further from the memory, how we spoke tautologically
on the ride home, gesturing in the shallow
language of men. Tonight—with five o’clock shadow,
callused palms, hair renouncing my head,
and whiskey tongue—I am a man, maneuver tight
corners of another pastoral road. When I clip the buck—
sovereign mass of muscle and antler, countenance
to twilight—the way it pinwheels,
this grotesque ballet, is almost beautiful, and its welted
forelimb prolongs the pirouette until shadowland
swathes the stag in nocturne once more. I count
my blessings, wonder if Pawpaw would shake his head
at my first inadvertent attempt at hunting. Not buckshot
but car bumper. Would he break out the old rifle, teach
me how to look down its sights? Would he tout
its accuracy, tracing carbon steel? We’ll
take her out tomorrow. Reach into the bucket
and grab Pawpaw a cold one, his wallpapered shadow
might say, kitchen bulb a swollen pear, headlines
refracted off reading glasses. Beyond, a countervail
of cricket wings overcomes this futile shadowbox;
questions recede, and I dream of fog ghosting up headland
from the bay like smoky snouts through a dark country.
Chris Joyner had previously spent the bulk of his life in Virginia Beach, VA, where he played in the woods as a child, then worked in marketing out of college. Now an MFA candidate at the University of Miami, he was recipient of the 2011 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize, and his pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in the Barely South Review, CaKe, and Fickle Muses. He tends to bastardize traditional forms. Please forgive him.
