Crepuscular Memory, poem by Chris Joyner

Combing the naked soil one country

morning, my mammoth Pawpaw taught

me to spot an Indian arrowhead

amidst dun rocks, beneath the wheel

of crow chatter filling pine shadows

cast long like swords across buckbrush.

Imagine my hands, the buck

fever I would have felt (countryside

echoing rifle-blast) if we had shadowed

that day like Monacan hunters—their bows taut,

tracking under cover of corngrass, deer wheeling

from misfired arrows whistling overhead—

but instead, around noon, we simply headed

back to his pickup. I made sure he buckled

his seatbelt as the trucks' bald wheels

hauled us further from Pungo county,

further from the memory, how we spoke tautologically

on the ride home, gesturing in the shallow

language of men. Tonight—with five o'clock shadow,

callused palms, hair renouncing my head,

and whiskey tongue—I am a man, maneuver tight

corners of another pastoral road. When I clip the buck—

sovereign mass of muscle and antler, countenance

to twilight—the way it pinwheels,

this grotesque ballet, is almost beautiful, and its welted

forelimb prolongs the pirouette until shadowland

swathes the stag in nocturne once more. I count

my blessings, wonder if Pawpaw would shake his head

at my first inadvertent attempt at hunting. Not buckshot

but car bumper. Would he break out the old rifle, teach

me how to look down its sights? Would he tout

its accuracy, tracing carbon steel? We'll

take her out tomorrow. Reach into the bucket

and grab Pawpaw a cold one, his wallpapered shadow

might say, kitchen bulb a swollen pear, headlines

refracted off reading glasses. Beyond, a countervail

of cricket wings overcomes this futile shadowbox;

questions recede, and I dream of fog ghosting up headland

from the bay like smoky snouts through a dark country.

 

Chris Joyner had previously spent the bulk of his life in Virginia Beach, VA, where he played in the woods as a child, then worked in marketing out of college.  Now an MFA candidate at the University of Miami, he was recipient of the 2011 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize, and his pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in the Barely South Review, CaKe, and Fickle Muses.  He tends to bastardize traditional forms.  Please forgive him.