The Hunt

I followed you through September's waning light,

over foggy woods and falling-out hope,

where every snapped twig was inscribed,

each remote sound the sigh of your form.

The hunter ultimately consumes the hunt—

I know it now, the boots reddened in leather prayers,

my hands, my remembering the weight of want.

the ache of fingers curled around nothing.

And you left your mark everywhere: a scent

of something almost-there, almost-known,

where you could have stood, the ghost of an impression.

the heat still rising in the cooling stone.

How many times did I believe this would be it?

The flicker in its movement through the break in the treeline,

the sound of your breath only that rustling—

but always, always, my mistake.

I came to love the almost as much as arrival,

how fast my heart would jump at every hint,

how disappointment sharpened my attention

until the pursuit was my only reality.

What makes a difference in the end when the arrow flies?

When aim and time converge in the air,

And then all that seeking coalesces into

an all perfect end arc—what’s there?

I’ve seen it in other hunters’ eyes:

that glimmer of confusion, loss, regret.

The object I which they pursued through years of watchful tracking

proves to be something they won’t soon forget.

Not triumph—something quieter and stranger.

Not joy — and yet recognition of a cost.

The hunt was the only thing to fill time.

Now they are somehow lost.”

So actually maybe I don’t want to catch you.

Maybe the forest is enough—

these trees who know my step as lover,

this mist that’s taught itself how to want,

how the light shatters in branches

into golden eps made by a thousand journeys.

Each time convinced this might be the morning

when everything I’ve hunted at last comes.

Maybe capture was never the point,

but of the slow metamorphosis of identity and self—

how hunting teaches us patience, why it brings silence to our minds,

teaches us to read fine print in the world,

to see the things those rushing by, absurdly busy

would never stop to observe or comprehend.

I am not the same person since I started.

The forest has changed all my maps.

The hunt has cut fresh instincts into my bones.

And you, wherever you are, real or imagined—

you have made me able to this:

the power of pursuit, the beauty of evasion,

the wisdom to continue anyway,

realizing that some hunts are worth hunting,

that to ask the question is one way to answer it,

that I could look forever and find contentment.

by mere footprints in the dew.

by shadows that might you loving through the trees,

by the cloying fatigue of the pursuit,

by coming back to my camp empty for supplies every night

and then they were on their way anew at the dawning of day,

hungry, hoping to be alive.”