Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target

Safety First.

Never point your weapon, keep your finger
off the trigger. Assume a loaded barrel,
even when it isn’t, especially when you know it isn’t.
Glocks are lightweight but sensitive;
the Keltec has a long pull and a kick.
Rifles have penetrating power, viz.:
if the projectile doesn’t lodge in its mark,
it will travel some distance
until it finds shelter; it will certainly
pierce your ordinary drywall partition.
You could wound the burglar and kill your child
sleeping in the next room, all with one shot.

Open Air.

Fear, of course. Then the sudden
pleasure of heft—as if the hand
had always yearned for this solemn
fit, this gravitas, and now had found
its true repose.

Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it—
squeeze between heartbeats.
Look down the sights. Don’t
hold your breath. Don’t hold
anything, just stop breathing.
Level the scene with your eyes. Listen.
Soft, now: squeeze.

Gender Politics.

Guys like noise: rapid fire,
thunk-and-slide of a blunt-nose silver Mossberg,
or double-handed Colts, slugging it out from the hips.
Rambo or cowboy, they’ll whoop it up.

Women are fewer, more elegant.
They prefer precision:
tin cans swing-dancing in the trees,
the paper bull’s-eye’s tidy rupture at fifty yards.

(Question: If you were being pursued,
how would you prefer to go down—
ripped through a blanket of fire
or plucked by one incandescent
fingertip?)

The Bullet.

dark dark no wind no heaven
i am not anything not borne on air i bear
myself i can slice the air no wind
can hold me let me let me
go i can see yes
o aperture o light let me off
go off straight is my verb straight
my glory road yes now i can feel
it the light i am flame velocity o
beautiful body i am coming i am yours
before you know it
i am home

Rita Dove, “Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target” from American Smooth. Copyright © 2004 by Rita Dove. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: American Smooth (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004)