The Persistence Hunter

Oh, dying hind, teach me how to dress your body

I  brought away the choice cuts of your meat
The bubbling belt along the broken chain of your spine
Your tender loins, never again to know the stag’s love

What would I do with the rest of you?
I softly drew the arrow from your neck

Shaft bent; fletching bloodied
Five-dollar carbon arrow, feathers broken,
Abandoned after its first flight

Oh, dying hind, what does it mean to be a man?

For hours, I sat still and silent in the live oak
My fingers, its boughs, both numb with the cold
I watched you for a while. I drew back my bow. I wept

How many of your sisters had I let flee
Into the woods? How many of your sons?

Back home, my father awaited my return
You were not the triumph he wanted for me
But how could I come back to him empty handed?

Oh, dying hind, how can I make my father love me?

His calloused hands guided the hacksaw
Through your bones and your sinews
While a broken bucket filled with your blood

I wanted to hear his voice praise me
When we shared the warmth of your flesh

When he stained my cheeks with your blood
Would he look upon me for the first time
And see my skin in the shape of a young man?

Oh, dying hind, you are not the first to die at our hands

Our victims slept soundly in the underbrush
When you woke to the sweet smell of yellow corn
Did you not wonder how it gilded the forest?

First, your sisters, then my own; it only takes one death
To question the warm comfort we find in this violence

The wood becomes a passage between hunt and home
Without care for the leaves crushed underfoot
Silences becomes both casualty and weapon

Oh, dying hind, how can we learn to worship and forgive?

My father grinds your legs into sausage
Your shoulders into vacuum-wrapped cubes
But you liver and kidneys, your heart and your brain

Will you forgive us for dumping them in the woods?
For feeding them to the buzzards and the black flies?

When your meets rots in the freezer
Beside the salmon pretending to be a river stone
And the frog legs who finally know silence

Oh, dead hind, teach me how to love without violence