Arboreality
They may have been lovers,
but then, who’s to say?
They in situ— a besot situation.
Some ill-begot infatuation.
The two of them lay upon the floor,
just there, next to the front door.
One spooning that of the other.
And affection affectation,
and yet what is this lesson taught
if not that such feral love be
deemed by some god as scurrilous?
In Disney films, a
squirrel meets a squirrel
and there falls in love.
In reality, each falls from a tree
as result of my father’s shotgun.
This an arboreality:
ground-bound gravity
gone grim gravitas.
They say heaven lies
in the sky above our heads,
and if so, how much
closer to that divine
are those breaching crests
of hallowed boughs and
the squirrels which therein abide?
Sacred? No.
There at our front door
lies lead-laden proof that
one can indeed fall from grace.
A blessed gulf tumultuous.
Yes, they which only a moment ago
had as cherubim leapt aerial adept
across a cathedral’s broad leafy arch.
Words fail us.
And yet that need
to communicate.
I, but a boy; yet my father,
the didactic man,
would here have me acquire an epiphany:
yes, that every shiny coin turns copper
upon one’s soon sunken eyes.
That this life is naught
but precursor to death.
That you may clap hands all you want,
but Tinker Bell’s spunk of spark is bunk.
Rather, that there in the city
some father might take his son
to watch Bambi in the theatre,
and there let loom
a curdled comprehension
that this fated fawn’s mother
will not last ‘til the end of the film.
Those hunters…
Those hunters…
Just what was it
that they carried
in their hands?
Some aspect of trauma.
Some aspect of death.
Yet Disney spares us
the sight of a somehow
inanimate carcass.
Yes, but my father?
No.
Not so much.
These were formative years.
My father attempting to make me a hunter.
My mother’s devout desire that
I there embrace her Christian faith.
My father had a special board
of which he’d use to
field dress small game.
And there the squirrel
would be pinned by its paws.
There its skin and fur
delicately stripped away.
There the gralloch process of
removing bowels and heart.
For this small boy, what
remained upon that crimson board
was less a squirrel and more
that of a human form
there deftly crucified.
Off in the distance, a
scurry of squirrels look down to see
that one of their brethren has
achieved a certain martyrdom.
That later that night
we will all partake
of the body.
Indeed, that of which we
now decree
quite divine.
Ó 2023 Jack David Hubbell
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