Mercy Me

said the womenfolk where I was raised, and in my mind
mercy was a verb, the action reflexive. Though of course
the wolf in the kingdom of winter does not mercy
the elk. The owl does not mercy the hare
that has trembled loose from its delicate coat of stillness.
The word has been used since the twelfth century to mean
God’s forgiveness of his creatures’ offenses.
Such mercy is not what my father had in mind
when he asked me to take a pistol to live
in the wilderness. I didn’t. That was not
how I imagined my days, strapping its cold weight
to my hip, a saunter to the river: Good morning
larkspur, good morning death camas and moon-
flower: I am more deadly than you. Would I
slip it into the crook of the quince tree while
I crouched to weed kale? And would I, after all,
shoot a bear eclipsing my doorway? Would I
shoot a man? Back home, another gun
in the safe where my bedroom dresser used to stand.
Out there, the news, a loaded gun, returns
again and again to the loaded gun. Here
the old growth murmurs at night, the dark’s bones
groan and creep. Once, barefoot in starlight
the color of gingerroot, trembling on the porch
at the unknowable’s cacophony, the dog in a huff,
I wondered if the fear, in the end, would get me
first. On the long, hawk-spangled
drive east, all things appeared to me as bodies: the log
haulers piled with the fallen forms of fir
coming down from the mountains, chicken trucks
with their live cargoes crushed into hunchback
and the smashed daisies of feathers from which
a dim red eye looks out. Across the frostbit
flatlands of Idaho, gleaming silver trucks piled
with fleshy potatoes: bodies, bodies, and on the radio
a story about a body unearthed from high
in the Andes, a woman’s form arrayed with spear
and ax-head, a big-game hunter. I want to summon
a blessing on this vanishing year — but I forget how
this works, what to say, in what order.
I’m thinking of my good Aunt Sue who for all
those years and even after the chemo and the electro-
shock therapy tucked her pale delicate chin at table
and said with quavering but without irony, We give
thanks. The moon’s between the fir’s ribs,
up there in the god-dark black. The fox still moves
in the roots and the rust. You could say and not lie
that this is most of what I long for in the way
of distance and the way of desire: may the fetters
fall from all of us this year. May the wild light
get way down in our bones. May we, without requital,
mercy one another with hands like wings,
with unarmed hands.