For Adam, 24, shot with his own gun after duck hunting, 1866.

How foolish to stand and gape
into this crevice, steep between
two slabs of stone, heaved upward
from the dank earth stretching
its green moss belly
in a waste of fertility and breath.
There is nothing to see
but the corpus emblazened
on a cross by a hunter’s moon.
Here, where they have laid
your bones, close to the ridge
by the sea, are apples, small
and taut, lost in a single snap
of cold, bedded under long grass.
You must have sensed it,
the garish nearness
of death in the first thud
of the bird, the moist stain
of feathers, the pop of your gun.
The moon that night a lantern
for a ghost-walk. The duck
on the ground splayed
in his own grease, the warmth
of his body seeping away,
toward you. And that moment,
when it came,
the force of the earth against your face,
must have been like falling
in the snow,
a white numbness,
the whisper of the vanishing point,
that slow soft quickening.

__________________________________________________________

Vicki Goodfellow Duke lives in Calgary, Canada. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Rock Salt Plum Poetry Review, Room of One’s Own, Circle Magazine, CV2, and Poetry On The Way. Recent awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize 2005 for a “young poet of unusual promise”, Room of One’s Own Poetry Award 2005, Ray Burrell Award 2005, and Friends Prize (Prairie Poetry: An American Journal) 2005.
Email : vickigduke at yahoo dot com
__________________________________________________________

"On an Epitaph" was first published in The Grist Mill, December 2005. __________________________________________________________

kaleidowhirl  |  spring 2007