Late Hunt
On a day this cold, you don’t even need the shotgun. They’re easy to spot, too, those beautiful birds dying in the tumbled stubble of harvest. Find their long tail feathers riffling prairie wind and you can take them alive out of little pockets in the snow. When you lift them from fencerows at the edge of empty pastures, from beside trees in abandoned orchards, withered fruit clattering overhead, from fallow ground where they shelter under shining plow-cut rubble of clods, they look up at you unmoved, eyes empty mirrors, odd ice in morning’s raw glare.
Tonight, below the Interstate, a cold familiar wind scours river ice six feet thick. New snowbanks build high under the bridge. Pearl is deserted, its few streetlights haloed in soot and old snow that spill in blizzards from downtown rooftops. That fine, chill powder when it dusts your face, melts and streaks down like tears. In front of Eagle Pawn Shop, where ragged spikes of rust-stained ice depend from eaves, tall, bistered drifts find hard shapes, slope knee-deep into the street. A plow, yellow lights flashing, growls across the intersection headed up Sixth. Rising over the vague skyline, the moon, oddly distinct, bright with an orient luster, counterfeits a silver coin in a deep pocket, an empty locket, a salver for a vanished chalice.
Along snow-choked back streets all across town, lights glow behind curtains in cozy rooms. And all you’ve got is a narrow bed in another cheap hotel. All you’ve got is a place where you can close your eyes while out here in the dark the world freezes over. All you’ve got is an accidental nest where like a winter-worn bird you can wait unmoved as what hunts you again tonight approaches through the cold.
Winter moon.
Trees in silhouette.
Gaunt wolves eat snow.
Jeff Streeby‘s poetry has appeared in Ginosko, Southwest American Literature, Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, and many others. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Assumption University in Bangkok, Thailand.
Note: Suisun Valley Review published a version of “Late Hunt” in Edition #26 (May, 2009).