Snakes didn’t bother you, nor gator holes.
You clutched your grandfather’s double barrel
10 gauge, illegal gauge, buckshot loaded.
The black bear was hunting shaggy wild pigs.
You let him pass.
You set into that fog again.
The girl on the other side of the swamp
was all you cared about that day.
Lost your shoes in quicksand.
Your dog lost herself.
A good buck came between two Cypress trees and stopped,
just looking at your two-eyed gun.
“Go on,” you said.
You walked on stickers in the gumbo mud.
After a while you were shaking a little.
You smelled woodsmoke of her old man’s cabin.
Heard his dogs get in a fight.
A whistle came from above. Up in her tree house.
Which was also her brothers’ deer stand.
The ladder was spikes driven into the gum tree.
You climbed like a strong monkey,
wearing your shotgun slung by a knotted clothesline.
“Get in here,” she said, laughing.
This poem drew me in completely with all the details of the young man’s journey through the swampy woods to be with the object of his desire. His razor-sharp focus, passing by the bear, the deer, everything, to reach his goal–and the last line, her brief laughing invitation, one can imagine how that made him feel. It is a poem all about youthful passions, and even passions of beginning attraction, no matter how old one is.
A poem so immediate, vivid, cinematic, that my own heart beat faster at the end.