Poetry and Chukar Hunting

Sunday, September Sunday … Outdoors,
Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,
Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,
Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,
A crow calls, deep in its own darkness,
Something like water ticks on
Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock …

Reading through some stuff for a school project, I came across a poem by Charles Wright called “The Appalachian Book of the Dead,” and some lines in it — because this is what happens sometimes when you allow yourself to read — arrested me and my chukar-on-the-brain-ness. The beginning of the poem, above, intersects with catalogs of my Hells Canyon chukar hunting memory. But it’s the end of the poem that really does it for me, brings it home in all the activity’s weirdness, struggling with the meaning of hunting and competing mortalities, the effort put into it, the miracle of motion, the season changes, and — mostly — the terrain…

I feel like I’m constantly trying to answer the question for myself, “Why this?” Finding things like this poem, which I don’t “understand” really, helps articulate possible answers, and that’s satisfying. What are you searching for, not just when you’re out there, but — even more — afterward?