Untitled ("Men go hunting where I am from")

A plainspoken rural scene that turns from subsistence and liquor into fear, masculinity, and the threat of male intrusion.

A poem of subsistence and sudden threat. Men cross 'the little frog creek' and 'come back with a deer / on a board that I clean,' food for 'a week / without going to the / grocery store'; then, while a drunk uncle visits, the speaker fetches 'a rifel' as 'sissy looking men / approached,' her real terror being that the 'virgin wood cabin would go up in smoke.'

The poem moves from the ordinary economy of hunting to an instant of armed defense, and the matter-of-factness of the first half is what makes the second half land. Hunting is plain provision, not sport - 'It is not a big deal' - the deer butchered by the speaker ('a deer / on a board that I clean') and stretched into a week's food, the grocery store an avoidable expense. The gendered division of labor is quiet but clear: the men cross the creek and kill, the woman cleans the carcass and, when needed, takes up the gun. The uncle's 'white liquer' in 'the middle of the day' sets a tone of casual disorder into which the threat arrives - unnamed 'sissy looking men,' the dismissive epithet doing double work as contempt and as a way to manage her own fear. Her grabbing the rifle is self-protection, but the poem's final disclosure relocates the fear: not the men's bodies but fire, 'that this / virgin wood cabin would go up in smoke,' so the deepest dread is for the home itself, the irreplaceable old-growth ('virgin wood') shelter that cannot be rebuilt. The poem is observed from inside the culture, the speaker both participant and clear-eyed reporter. The spellings ('liquer,' 'rifel,' 'sissy') are the source's and I have preserved them.