This week’s poem was inspired by a famous Winslow Homer painting that depicts a man precariously balanced on an evergreen bough, aiming a rifle. While he might at first seem to be hunting deer in a bucolic woodland scene, Homer’s title – “The Army of the Potomac – A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty” – shows us the darker truth of his aim. There is no punctuation in Julie Poitras Santos’ poem; each line reads as a complete thought. Together, they form a lyric meditation, troubled and troubling, on the human hunt we call war.
Poitras Santos’ writing has appeared in The Café Review, The Chart, Living Maps Review, The New Guard and elsewhere. Her visual art has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. Poitras Santos is the director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.
Sharpshooter
By Julie Poitras Santos
after Winslow Homer, 1863
Nobody knows when the first men started
We learned to hunt to feed our hunger
Sound of the river and distance, sound of the winter’s wind
A camp was erected in spring not far from the shore
Some scrambled up trees in the dawn
They studied the movements of prey
The way of the needles the scent of the clay in the earth
The scent of pitch on skin
Shadows appeared with the sun the hop of cardinal or sparrow
A boot in the crotch of tree
Shouts spilled across in the shoreline silence
An echo of animal feeling in turn
The painting without the edge of the frame
The painting and a sequence of events off stage
The face and the hand and the hand
The diagonal marks of a viewer’s gaze
Balanced the gun on the hand and shoulder
Balanced the arm on the knee on the branch
The touch of a brush on canvas, a dab of cadmium red
The sound of – absolutely nothing is moving
Contracted and tensed for arrival
The thumping of blood in ears
Hiding the stock in the blind
Lifted the sight to eye
The crack and split of the echo in half –
History will tell us: “the nation”
Recollection aligns with the suffering
Of mastery we’ll ask many questions
A ghost just passed in the glass behind you
The gun was aimed at a man
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Sharpshooter” copyright © 2019 by Julie Poitras. It appears by permission of the author.
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