The Bear Hunter

I held a bottle of cheap vodka

inside the Charleston liquor store

on a Sunday morning in May.

Ahead of me:

standing cockeyed,

a young, red-haired man,

stringy red beard,

camouflage clothing,

backwards ball cap,

drinking a Monster,

most of his teeth missing,

mangling an American dialect,

spinning a yarn to the clerks

with bored faces behind the counter.

He’d bagged a black bear last night,

at dusk,

before the spring season

closed at midnight.

A wild boar then appeared,

charged him,

and he shot that motherfucker, too!

(There are no feral swine on the Oregon Coast.)

He’d be canning the bear later.

It made great taco meat.

His kids were in the truck

fiddling on phones,

giggling.

He wasn’t buying booze,

just beef jerky for his girls.

He had to hurry or they’d be

late for church and miss a

modern evangelical take

on the Sermon on The Mount

that omits practicing everything Jesus preached.

Minutes earlier:

vultures commanding a secret cove

perched in black snags,

sea stars shining at low tide,

herons spearing fish in tide pools,

pelicans tumbling into waves

like ordnance dropped from a benign bomber,

my driftwood fort solid and evanescent,

the ocean rolling the color of pool table’s felt

left outside on the Oregon Coast for 30 years.

(There is such a pool table rotting in a field near Nehalem.)

And heard a story of influencers desecrating a tribal burial site

located on a rock where an abandoned lighthouse

stood 500 yards away.

I had written that poem before leaving the beach,

but it vanished standing in line

behind the Bear Hunter.