HILL COUNTRY ELEGY

Let the barbed wire fence line divide everything.
     Let it determine the boundaries between day
and coming darkness. Let the beef cattle enter

     and exit the pasture as they each see fit,
licking piles of salt from the round, rubber basins
     the hired hands fill for their thick tongues to lick.

Let what the deer eat in the long drought be enough.
Let the landscape contain itself. Here where the sun
going gradually down leaves me singing the songs

German forefathers sang, ranchers taming the land,
let me return to the basics of living off it every day.
For over eighteen years I thought I would never grieve

leaving here. Now, it’s the deer calling me back
     with their white tails, faint flicks in the darkness again
between my snake chaps and the bee brush, the mesquite

scrub and the needled cactus spines. Daylight
devours itself—feasting on its own prickly-pear flesh.
As I pass through the pasture on my way to the highway

I see a buck. In my high-powered scope, in the crux
of its crosshairs where the deer marks a vanishing point,
there’s an infinite place I can never quite reach: an erasure

     fills it. Both the buck and myself will disappear
and I understand this. But until then, my body joins
     the buck’s. For a second, we’re linked by the bullet

fired through twilight between us. Its hot cone breaks
     his skin—enters my skin. Shared friction burns
at its vanishing point where a great peace fills me

     and an emptiness, him. Christ got up on a cross
to prove he meant business. My own father took me
     hunting several times, though the 4AM wake-up calls

overwhelmed me. Now I’m doing it simply because
     I miss him. This one ritual kill is ours. Tonight
we can say anything. Distance passes through us

     like light thrown down from stars. We are
drawn near by it—so close the bullet I shoot
     at the sky, streaking up, touches him.