The Hunter

She stored colored lights for the season but
to find them she must brave the upper room,
kingdom of cockroach and fiddle-back,
and search with candles, for
the window gathers dusk,
the wall-switch has a short, the electric torch is dead,
and her lamp oil gone.
Foolish virgin among the packing crates
preserving a tangled string of winter nights
throughout the daylight-saving days of summer!
Flesh pimples at the brush of dust, the whick
of nails on cardboard so brittle and sere
that one tongue of flame would kindle the lot.
The risk is real but at least, she thinks,
it would mean a Pentecostal end
to all of this shifting, poking, sifting
the ashes of her several lives.
The things that count today grace the public floors below
mid antiseptic chrome and streakless glass,
but here boxed Bedlam dominates
in caches of ancient tax-law books,
jumbled collections of sea shells and stones,
porcelain baby dolls swaddled and blind,
trophies glinting through bubble wrap—
and once a sparrow that had flown against the rafters
and not flown away.

When she found the lights, they’d been gnawed by rats,
debauchers of cartons and schemes;
the grimy panes held stars by then, no nova.
She watched until Orion gained the attic of the sky,
Rigel guttering to blue
and light-years leaching glory from their lord’s red shoulder.

Joy A. Farmer