A poem depicting two memories of a father: one of a failed hunt where he climbs a tree in despair, and another of a family hike where he climbs to find home, both revealing his hidden fears and the children's admiration.
A poem Pietro Bucciarelli / Connected Archives I.
Step where I step, he said, quick, quiet over oak root. The hushed path rose
to meet him. By footfall and rifle glint, rustle of hoof and pulp of blood,
he led me deep where the gut-shot buck had made its briary bed. Even from the shining
back of his scalp, I knew his face, shame-shadowed at his own poor aim,
at the animal’s pain grown shadow-long with the fall of dusk. Three times we neared
the deer, and each it heard our ragged breath and stood and lumbered beyond sight.
Come swamp’s edge he turned skyward. Gun on his back, he climbed the bur oak.
His eyes hungered over earth and found no sign. I watched from below.
He looked past light, past knowing. How the buck would die: slow
and alone in the mouth of the woods. The many ways it would become.
Scarlet waxing the moon of a tick. Blackberry sheen of a buzzard’s coat.
II.
Heat pearled our skin as we followed up the mountain’s face.
His idea, to tie our coats to the trunks of trees. The clumsy knots
of their arms a gift, an embrace. Sophie so small that
only a sapling would do. We moved on, lightened, cooled.
The air thinned and the land went blue. How good it felt,
to toil awhile in sun for the sight of a rippling valley.
It was Christmas. Earth was new. Then dusk.
Then darkness like a minnow net. Then us, its catch.
Then the path swallowed by brush. Then, again,
the needling cold. Our arms were bare. We did not know
he was afraid. Even as he climbed the white pine
to search for some sign of home. Even as we shivered
on the earth below. Look how he sways in the treetop,
