Boy Up From Hunting

THE sad amber sunlight of winter afternoon,
Driving men indoors, enmeshed him as he stood
Beside the barn, having come up from hunting.

Sad, sad as the music of a far Drench horn,
It winded from the hillocks to the west,
Caught him, suffused him with a distillate
He could not name. He watched the cider wash
It spread across the old track-pitted snow and he saw there
The long, slim-tentacled, and violet ghosts
The cold trees laid before them on the ground. He felt the light
Wake something in him — as a vibrant bell,
Far-tolling, tongues one captive in the hand.
And all the old chimeric conquests planned
And won and lost in the inchoate void
Of race and time possessed him. Nothing was there —
No image light-shapen, no sign echoed in the sky
Yet in this ancient fire out of the world’s first winters
A flaring borealis of old gods
And heroes strode for the boy in a bursting thrill
Of sudden glory. Paraded; faded, leaving him swiftly chilled
With an ineffable and ageless loneliness —
The winter heritage of the first lost man.

The cold snow shadows metaled the eastern slopes
And the boy turned aside
Abruptly, breaking his gun, letting the brass-capped shells
Kick upward against his mittened hand. Ahead, at the house,
A kerosene lamp blurred yellow in the kitchen’s eye. The boy’s gum-boots
Sledged clumsily as he trudged through the orchard toward the gleam,
The shotgun under his arm, and at his heels
The first strange evening shadows of mortality.