If all day you’d been kneeling
and crouching behind trees
or bushes or crawling through grass
and suddenly straightening
your spine and your knees and running
hard and fast to come close
(before you tried to kill it)
to the wild game also running
hard, harder and faster
than you could, wouldn’t you too
have been thinking of somewhere—
not to stoop or hunker,
not to sit on your heels
or flop down altogether—
but to take a load off your feet,
to lower yourself closer
to the earth, bending at least four
of your hinges, trying to rest
the two more fully padded,
not onto a stone,
but maybe a dry stump
you’d found and remembered
and hollowed beforehand
or had learned to duplicate
from pieces of itself,
a place you could be at ease
but halfway standing up,
half ready to make tracks?
Menu