squaring off

The word 'cull' looks and sounds pleasing to me.  But it connotes something nefarious when the word appears in a discussion about wildlife or livestock.  Nothing more.  I return from a six-month hiatus.  But I never went anywhere.  'Sabbatical.'  That word harbors more selective emotions.  I do not particularly enjoy the way it looks but the sound of it intrigues me well enough.  But, after all, it means nothing, to me, in its irrelevance with my own life.  I recall things, in bed.  But I leave the bed and the things leave too.  Or they stay there.  I am quite unsure of which.  One should not talk that way.  It is not a feasible pronoun.  No, I meant to say 'palpable.'  Odd, though in a manner of some peripheral interest.  That feels right there.  Four clicks upon the digitized odometer.  Carries itself out in a single motion.  Fascinating, the lack of ocular immediacy.  That, however, feels incorrect.  Direly distasteful.  Do not equate this to the re-reading of something else.  We are not related.  A simple image escapes me.  Just coming up with a basic human representation.  A symbolic gesture.  But even that is too much.  I desire something even more essential.  Teeth snapped like fireworks.  Only less like rubberbands.  Taxidermied things impress and repel me.  Or impress me in their ability to deter.  Or disgust me in their awe.  I do not know.  Just like I do not know why I fail to employ a contraction.  A contradiction.  We paradoxicate the air under the circus-like tent of pretense.  That fits.  But it is still like putting socks on a chicken.  A paramount expression.  Lights and petroleum jelly.  A rattlesnake bite kit in a giant silicone pill.  Guidebooks inherited decades too late.  Indian Paintbrushes.  I thought these things.  I conjured these unstories.  The fish, they swim.  The elk, they flee.  Why do these sparrows cheep at two in the morning?  Noises typically frighten me and certainly at this hour.

last field

            “They hunted pronghorn antelope by attaching something shiny to a post in the ground,” my father said, “and then they would go hide behind a rock and wait with their bows.”

            He sipped from his longneck of Coors, gripping the tapered mouth between thumb and forefinger.  I did not know which Native American tribe ‘they’ referred to, exactly.  I had stopped listening just prior to the part about these peculiar stalking methods: the goading uses of light-catching mirrors and minerals.  Even gaunt, spindly quadrupeds could not escape the shimmering allure of fate, apparently.  Just the words, the simulation of it, had ensnared me.    

Before my father’s historical flourish—how had the conversation even regressed to this?—I’d been unable to avert my eyes from the squeaky full-court presses and lofty three-point arcs that played themselves out on the bar’s staggering flat screen.  But now, I stared at my father, pulling from my own bottle.  The age spots on his forehead dotted like a significant constellation and his hair appeared thinner than just yesterday.    

“Pronghorns,” was all I could toss back to him. 

My mind flew.  I tried to imagine feathers and arrowheads, plain winds and small pebbles in the bases of grass strands.  Except I only saw beaded loincloths, black braids, and clear inaccuracies.  This was too hard.  We all just seek horizontalness, a quiet singularity.  My father and I drank from our Coors bottles, nearly in unison.  Nearly. 

            I looked back to the massive television.  Kobe missed a free throw (it hit the front of the rim and bulleted right back to him) and the crowd around us rumbled loud enough to mute the game announcer.  I swiveled to the passing waitress and ordered another beer.  By the time I’d pivoted back to the giant screen, there was a close-up of Kobe, gnawing on the top of his jersey, that Laker-yellow illuminating the faces in the darkened booths like a searing quasar in the cold bodies of space.