Draft 1, Something to do with Nature

A Hunt

We bend below the barbwire fence at Bartlett’s pasture
with slings of twenty-twos around our bony shoulders
and pistols in our jacket pockets. Now this is a hunt,
you whisper, your father won’t miss the bullets. I said
A full moon would be out but damn if there aren’t clouds
just above the silo. All the holsteens gather themselves
by these rusted-out Chevrolets, some prone, dew covered.
The flashlight cuts the black air where
Bartlett sleeps, his little white ranch, a paintchipped
swingset in the backyard. It’s not a big pasture
you say, waving your father’s Mag-Lite like a TV cop.
One of the heard hears me slip in the wet grass,
dirtying the knee of some camouflaged jeans—the bellows.
Do it, you hiss, teeth clenched,
and I do.

Now this is a hunt—
but when you take a rifle into a pasture, expect to only maim,
like my father with the lead ball still lodged in his cheek.
So when you say this is a hunt, I begin to know nothing
about it. Bartlett’s window alights, pale, yellow, obscured
by blinds and his wife’s lace curtains. The four green
fields on Stateline and Highpoint—they all belong to Bartlett.
The mist fades and the moon staggers in unwelcome, half
drunk, mooing like the cows and we are the cud—
only with petty rifles, petty bullet thieves we are.