By Connie Wanek

Featured Image: The Thundershower by H. Lyman Saÿen 1916

Country people rise early
as their distant lights testify.
They don’t hold water in common. Each house
has a personal source, like a bank account,
a stone vault. Some share eggs,
some share expertise,
and some won’t even wave.
A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate.
Last November I saw a woman down the road
walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange
cap to boot, a cautious soul.
Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign.
Strange to think they’re in the air
like lead bees with a fatal sting.
Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen
with his rifle handy and the window open.
You never know when. Once
he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill.
He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy,
came back. Hard work never hurt a man
until suddenly he was another broken tool.
His silhouette against the dawn
droops as though drought-stricken, each step
deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox,
prying it open. Checking a trap.

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Connie Wanek’s new collection of poems, On Speaking Terms, will be released in January 2010 from Copper Canyon Press. Her two previous books are Bonfire and Hartley Field. A 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress, Wanek lives in Duluth, Minnesota. Her website can be reached at www.conniewanek.com.

Originally appeared in NOR 7