I
Lure makers start with deer hair, hackles,
herls from a plume or a swatch of fabric
to craft an illusion with a barbed hook.
The trout may think it sees a minnow,
or a hopper on the water, or a blood worm.
Deadly ambiguity. But ducks are drawn by kinship.
A seasoned waterman gouges an eye, curves a bill,
carves pine to feathers the way his father taught him.
It hardly matters how crude the likeness, as long as it floats.
Sometimes a live duck is trapped and leashed for bait:
it paddles, and rises to flap its wings, and calls
in its usual honk, both warning and welcome.
Sometimes a dipper is set with the rest: a dead bird
staked as if feeding, its tail lifted up in the wind.
A man in a sinkbox crouches, his hat one more prop.
Hunters lie in a blind, or squat to deal
poker with shot for chips, except for the guide,
squinting until specks become visible. Ready. Now.
2
In a panelled room, a mallard spreads its wings
but never moves. The glass eyes catch the light
from out in the hall. A child, surrounded by waterfowl,
a horned owl, a squirrel turned upside down, begs
for another guest room, begs for old stuffed animals,
without claws or beaks, to hug until he falls asleep.
When he wakes, the car pulls off on a dirt road,
hobbling into ruts until the landing. Men armed
like a posse crack open shotguns. He’s never seen
such long binoculars. Then the rowboat pushes off,
oars creak in the locks, water plashes as the shore recedes.
Half way out a flock passes over, but no one shoots:
not time. Stragglers flap behind a scraggly formation
under films of clouds. Wind blows after them,
drawn like wake behind their wake: the faintest wind.
And then they reach the blind, a bale
of rickety sticks with the roof blown off, dark as smudges
on grey water. And the decoys start to drift.
3
So a boy who couldn’t hit a tin can
at ten paces learns the trick of double triggers:
if one round misses, the other won’t; buckshot
sprays so far, a duck might think it, if he thought,
hail rising from the ground. But now it drags him to the water;
now it swells like black eggs in his belly.
In the distance, the boy sees a canvasback
drop limp before he hears a rumble of shots
from the other shore, a mile away.
And black clouds rise from fortresses of driftwood.
And tonight, they tell him, everyone will roast wild bird.
And if you bite into buckshot it will bring good luck.
But what luck guides him into sleep, when all
he hears are gunshots echoing? Shaking hands,
he’s slipped a charm for his pocket: a webbed foot
softened by a vinegar bath. A paddle
he can twist between his fingers while he waits—
and wishes the sky would darken above the marsh.
4
Out skipping oyster shells, he comes to a shanty:
abandoned, its pier half washed away, a pile
of crabpots and decapitated decoys by the shore.
Too much handling, too much twisting on a tether in the bay
has broken their necks. He stares at the pieces:
fragments of cracked pine, bleached on top but dark underneath,
losing their wings as paint flakes away. On the water’s edge,
living is so unsure: you drift with the tides, from mud flats
to estuaries, drawn by the winds that hide your scent,
as ducks are drawn like metal to a magnet, the terrain
enlarging as they sweep below, ready to pitch in shallow water.
He too has dreamed of flight. Not a shooting gallery’s
dented tin that flips back when it’s hit, resurfacing
in a loop for the next go-round. And not the scattering
of wings, the rush when you open fire. Another flight.
Circling these leavings, he kneels to pick up
scraps of discarded wood from the pile- -a head, a body–
to piece together one likeness that will be whole.
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