Friends have told me of a wish fulfilling tree
    --For Tom Coca

    Perhaps you too think this is our last sunset
    how fire light dips behind the hills
    and as if by luck the roan oaks and junipers
    steep into the gray of a fool moon

    Tomorrow--you the hunter in clearings of green
    scented with the whisper of skunks and apples
    cowled to the back of your boot
    ascend and cross the sky

    I will find you

    But now for the very first time
    we will watch
    the frogs intrusion to the stars
    on the still of the stock tank

    the green of thick summer gramma
    etching the thin of my shanks
    with dew
    stories of crickets flowing
    into the forefront of the prairie with hills
    in each dark footstep

    All this smiling in the sheen of new antlers
    My coat covered with the ochre of my out urine

    Grunting, thinking of you--
    dreaming of the perfect plastic fletching
    sleeping lightly with a racing heart

    And mine is poisoned
    not with love, nor fear
    but with the misgivings of my own good fortune
    of the sick seasons before in a late gallop
    The pith of my body for one brief instant
    covered with the blade of my shoulder
    dulled, cut, healed over
    in good grass and siring
    finally I have been touched with blood

    friend, bowman--
    it is the turbulence of our own hearts
    the world itself is rather uneventful--

    Now crossing over the hill
    morning fire building in the Eastern slope
    you hunched under the full weight of pinon
    with the bow string pulled to you cheek
    Perhaps I have found myself
    at the edges of this peaceable kingdom

Copyright © Henry Oso Quintero, 2001.  All Rights Reserved.