Hunting Camp

The pages of your poetry book melt in your hands

as you read aloud the poems you’ve read a thousand times before.

The other hunters grimaced when they saw you’d brought your book

and not a blued rifle, not a single round of ammunition to hunting camp.

They disbersed at first ruddy blush of light, rifles in hand.

Up into honey-colored parks where antlered bulls clash

but whistle like flightless birds.

You remain at camp,

feeding gathered sticks into a woodstove inside the wall tent.

The sides of the tent ripple and glow with full light.

Far above, in thick stands of pines gnashing together in the northwind,

elk have turned into ghosts and whisked away.

Inside your book, on one page,

a man rides a roan horse off through green sage. 

On another page, a woman with red hair returns to a battered lover.

Everyone, from beginning to end, hunting.

--Mitchell Hegman