The Rifle

Mosquitos mill in the dust
floating in the humid air
of a white timber porch,
on the hill the cattle
bat them off into infinity
where they lunch on microbes
or the blood of ghosts.
On the porch, a man
sits and cleans his rifle
with a bit of rag,
each tiny ligament and organ
atomised, light as chicken bones,
each part half of itself.
All will be assembled
on the man's clean lap
in the blue evening light.

He stares into the trees.
All that was taken out
will be put back in,
made clean in the daybreak,
the sum of an equation
old as the pine barrens.
He fingers a spent casing,
throws it over his shoulder
into a pile of sawdust.
It patters on the wood
as a pulled out tooth
into a bed of flowers.
There are animals out there,
he thinks. Wolves.

He rises from his chair
and leans the reassembled rifle
against the peeling white front
of his quiet wooden house.
His eyes seem to flicker
across the surface of sight
and the halfsight in which
his ancestors pass like smoke.
He feels pain of age,
his coniferous blood running on
into a calm green clearing
where his body cannot follow,
where the quarry will turn
only to embrace its hunter
in a dream, like sleep.

There is fire that night,
somewhere up on the hill.
Dawn, he takes the rifle
like a still sleeping child
up the hill, through smoke
blossoming slowly from the earth,
grey flowers, memory of life.
As the sun lunges up
to smash the halflight in,
he fires the gun.