Practice Shots

temple, nh

Practice Shots

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

                                                                                The Way it Is

                                                                                William Stafford

Later we’ll maybe say it was you went the long way around

too, choosing (but who could, to your face, say that)

the same way she did: the booze you take up

and put down like a whore (your word for her though
I don't know who you meant); the pills

in your hand are tiny as your life has become.  It’s like trying

to look through to the barn using the eye level

bullet hole in the fence still some ways off, and not saying, 

we all know you made it, or at least I do, I remember the day

and the way you walked off with the .22 and a box

of shells and split the air down her middle and every time

she stitched herself back together you’d split her apart

again.  When you were done you took the gun down to

its wide open self and oiled it and cleaned it just like you
were taught to. Once, after you’d taken up with the wrong girl and she left

you, you came back home with your gun and locked it

up, but not before you had it all apart and spread out

on the kitchen table, the weekend paper taking up some of the open

spaces and the old headlines and obituaries (it was

something peculiar to you, to open the paper up to the dead

and lay your gun on their faces and names the way

you’d ease the barrel across the top of them all and set

it empty, the barrel gleaming, how you said once the blue

hue of it reminded you of the meat on the inside of a shot dog’s

jaw and after hearing that I walked away and I wasn’t sure

of you anymore. Before you went away for good I wanted

to ask you about that bullet hole, and how by design it lines

up with the window to your old bedroom and later (I could’ve

decided when I first saw it but seeing isn’t speaking is it?)

I’d wonder if it was all practice shots for the one real one

how if you could stand behind the plank at the distance

you must’ve stood (you were home alone that day) and saw

right through the plank across your face and straight

into the pillow on your bed.  You fired: into wood, into glass,

into feathers.  And "it's not all that big of a mess" was the only

thing you’d confess.  The one or two flutters by the time you made it

all the way into the house and the linen scorched and the bullet

in the far wall.  Someone must’ve been hunting—remember lying

with your hands in your pockets?  Remember pulling

the bullet out later and placing it like a tooth, cold and amp-

lified under your ear?  Did it still ring?  Did you?  Did,

cleaning your gun that day, or any day after that, make

any sense to you.  Can you, on your sometimes sober days

even remember loading the gun?  Taking it up into the field? 

Turning around to face it all?  Putting it up to your cheek?  Breathing

in, holding it, letting it out when you pull the trigger?  Who

did you hope to see taking leisure, laying down for a nap, sleeping

in your bed, but you?