For besides beaver teeth, my

            love had more pocks on

                        his face than a watermelon

has seeds. New rain falling

            on the tub of leaf-covered

                        corn by our feet—loam

squished up between our

            toes—so I think our tracks

                        became the fossilized map

of where we walked through

            broom sage thicket & pecan

                        grove to get to where we

stood that night—aiming a

            flashlight’s beam up sky-

                        bayous of splayed tree limbs—

spider eyes glinting like hot

            star-planets & silvery tails

                        of moss comets, caught

midfire in the branches. He

            angled his father’s twenty-

                        two toward a coon he’d

treed in the crook of the

            trunk & we could hear an

                        owl woo the animal through

a universe so foreign & deep

            we neither fathomed the

                        span of its wings, nor what

strange custom carried its

            voice to the woods where

                        the boy had found—bright

hills—my hips & strung me

            with a necklace of hickeys so

                        I was bound to the moment

by its un-spent bullets, webbed

            branches teeming with eyes,

                        the ugly boy whose face I loved,

& the wooing owl who flew

            off with the coon in her talons

                        before we could shoot her down. 

J.D. McClatchy chose Jane Springer’s first book, Dear Blackbird, for the Agha Shaid Ali prize (University of Utah Press, 2007). Her second book, Murder Ballad, won the Beatrice Hawley award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books in May, 2012. Her other awards include the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an NEA grant, and a Whiting Award (2010). She currently teaches poetry at Hamilton College, in upstate, New York, where she lives with her two dogs, Woofus and Georgia.