I do not want to kill them
but I would.
You would too–
if you’d grown up
learning to measure
the shadow on the hardwood slopes
where the creek bed
dips
into a trough of cold October light
playing tricks
with emptiness and space
and you’d known
the awe of finding
in all that dry and
barren late
some bold stately
eight-point buck
thrashing the headwind
scrub
for the high country
not at all
unlike yourself
seeking the bite
of cliff stone
and winter spare
as boiled crystal quick
in silence and risk and
the clarity of sense,
only to find
that first
face
you remember
and have always belonged to.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella, The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes, The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Las Delaciones del Sueno, translated by Antonio Saborit with an Introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico.
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