Squirrel Hunting Diptych

by Michael Dechane 

              Chiefland, Florida

Against an achromatic morning sky
in the pewter kink of a scrub oak limb
a gray squirrel, tensed in a quivering coil.
It’s angry and chucks at our intrusion,
my father and me, in these final moments
of being. It barks, barks, the only sound
in this crook of the world’s silence, threshing
the smoky articulation of its tail
against nothing. My eight-year-old hands
level the barrel and choke of my shotgun
eclipsing its nickel head with the brass bead
of the sight, but I cannot watch what I will do.
I flinch and fire blindly overhead.
The ragged edge of the leaden pattern
punches through the dun scrawl of its defunct
intestines and it falls. Paroxysmal,
the billet of its body springs off
the leaf litter over and over, aimless
and senseless, a heaving upward as if
it was the ground that wounded it this way.
My father, quick to exhibit mercy,
clamps its head in the duff with his boot
takes the tail as a flail handle and brains it
against the scrub oak trunk. And again. Again.
And a fourth wet crack on the tree,
an overflowing measure of mercy.

              Defiance, Missouri

A few stubborn apples hold on
but the year’s peak russet week fell
last month. Like old blood we let out,
the drying leaves cover this ground.
Below these limestone cliffs, the dun
churn of the Missouri rolls past.
The scrollwork on your father’s gun
across my lap, his side-by-side
Ithaca, is beautiful and cold
to my touch. It might snow today.
As always, now, you are not here
to hear me. And I don’t know how
I would say this if you were. I’m lost
in that place of looking intently
at details that do not matter because
inside, I cannot turn from what does.
A fox squirrel drops lightly into
my line of sight from a hickory
and lopes straight toward me.
It’s an easy, twenty-yard shot
I’ve made a hundred times. But when
it begins to climb the canted trunk
of a red oak, one filament
of sunlight strikes the tree. The squirrel
ascends, a candescent rivulet.
An immolation. A prayer.
Another last word between us.

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Michael Dechane’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Spiritus, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Night Heron Barks, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2020 International Poetry Contest, and the winner of Ruminate’s Broadside Poetry Prize in 2020. A native of Odessa, Florida, he is now a full-time digital nomad. Read more of his poetry at https://michaeldechane.com/.