Mexico Series, Las Penitas, Pastel, by John Cummings
Blind Hunting
(Tumacacori, AZ)
4:08 pm— Macadamia nuts, chocolate and red wine. My wife likes the sitting in the quiet with the snacks. She only shoots deer when she has to. And doesn’t enjoy it. We joke one day she might miss on purpose yelling, Go free, Go free. She likes eating venison though. Clocking hours together sitting in the blind– taking turns between the camping chair and the bucket with the swivel lid– is good for our marriage. We end up talking. Quietly. Slowly. About death and our children. About desire. When we start to bicker, I say keep your voice down I think I see a deer.
4:52 pm— The fancy nuts make me miss my father. My Dad loved food. Before he died, we reenacted a trip his father took him on, driving from national park to national park. During the meals he’d talk about the next one coming down the road. We ate our way across the American West. The monks told me you’re not supposed to eat to satiation. Stop short. Don’t let the tank fill. I tried that for a year. Nowadays I top it off. But not with extras like desert or sweets, but the main course– more potatoes, bread, tortilla, wild meat.
5:50 pm— I recall several years ago in a canyon to the west of here, I shared with a good friend some expensive vacuum sealed French cheese I brought back home. Besides what Jim Harrison ate, I don’t know how much of that cheese this desert has seen. Or smelled.
. . .
6:12 am— Getting in the blind we flushed another deer out of the draw. Yesterday it was a doe. This morning it is still too dark to tell.
6:53 am—I desire a mule deer buck to walk into this draw. And I would enjoy eating it with horseradish very much. It is my wife’s tag, so she is the one who’s supposed to shoot. The scope kissed her nose when she shot her deer last year. Several of her psychologist professor colleagues asked her about it. I glass the north slope again. I can imagine one bedded down under a mesquite. Kapow. But I am not greedy or gluttonous. As for my wife, she doesn’t have enough raw desire accrued pursuing deer to get into something like greed. My son has more desire but even he, I haven’t seen get greedy. I once caught an especially large bass to close a seventeen-fish-day. And it was Father’s Day and also my daughter’s birthday. I felt like a fat Buddha for a couple of weeks. No desire. As if fishing and catching, I told myself, were the same. Hell, maybe I can just help others net their fish, tie on lures? It did not last.
7:30 am– It’s too damn cold to sit in this blind, I tell her. I take the heavy blanket and shooting stick, and she grabs the rifle and food bag. We find a spot northwest looking down into the draw. Sun on our faces. After yogurt we crack open our pistachios in silence.
9:48 am– We are back in the blind.
11:00 am– I am getting very hungry.
_____________________
Craig Goodworth
Review by Keith Hansen
Blind Hunting is a poem about desire. The poet as much as tells us this more than once throughout the course of the piece. What is so satisfying to me about the poem is how he weaves this meditation on the subject through the present, the past, his time with people (most importantly, his wife) nature, animals. All of this, within the context of several mysteries; the apparent impossibility of lasting satiety, the conflicts between desires and, beyond that, the question of whether there is some kind of infinite, archetypal desire from which all temporal ones are sourced (and if there is, could this portend the eventual “end of all desire?”).
“Blind” hunting. Where does desire come from? Why is it not the same for everyone? Why, like thirst, can it only be temporarily slaked? The cyclic nature of the poem, the endless arising of and pursuit of desire: “We are back in the blind”, “I am getting very hungry.” We’ve ended where we started, regardless of how much nuts, chocolate, red wine, venison and horseradish has been consumed, no matter how much time spent with the monks, with friends hunting or eating fine cheese in the desert, no matter how many times the marriage has been delightfully consummated.
Is it greedy to desire? The monks say that the pursuit of satiation is a problem- it keeps us stirred up, restless, on a jag of sensation. The ever-receding horizon of satiety, like addiction, can be both bondage and a seductively “pleasant misery.”
But the world we live in – natural world, world of Eros, world of friendship and love – is one that seems worthy of desire, even though it can be and often is an ambivalent one where evil lurks and, at best, even legitimate desires conflict and become disordered. As problematic as it may be, how can we possibly live without desire? We experience it as the energy and source of so much life. It is that which, for better or worse, compels and impels us to act.
Meanwhile, some more macadamia nuts, chocolate, and red wine, please.