The Field

Carried off by boredom from the deer blind

Followed older brother's footsteps

Through the thick brush in behind him slow

Approaching where the forest broke

Saw him standing at the tree line

Hunter orange distorted in the boughs of pines

Between us in the woods

Where I stood now in my hand-me-downs in the cold

The same ones my uncle wore

In that framed page from the press

Both of them up north, above Dad's desk

A couple years after their father's death

And his brother left

Stood and watched him scan the open field with his rifle scope

About a mile deep, twice as wide at least

Where we could see

Military netting draped across the canopy of trees

Tried to keep up where he walked on

There appeared to be some compound

On the far side of the clear-cut

We knew the rumors of militia grounds

In the north, heard on our radios

Locals poaching does, talk in voices down

By the bait piles on the ridge

And father waited patient, eyeing deer sign from his blind by the lake and I

On the other side of it

Kept on walking through the field to find my brother standing posed with his gaze locked

In the ground down in a pit

Scattered with carcasses

Skin on their bones dried

Skulls sawed for the antlers of the dead

Like some portal to nowhere now

For forever and no time, I watched

Trancelike with the vultures overhead

Heard his boots in the grass again

The fading of footsteps away

Knew he was walking off

To the compound up ahead

And I knew I had to break from the trance

Follow fast in that direction

Or I'd never find a way to close the gap

That if I stared down in the corpses there, transfixed

He would go that way forever

And I would stay here staring downward

And I did