The Old Hunter

The hunter peeled the cinnamon-skinned hide
away from its flesh before parsing the parts
among his containers, the beet red blood
pooling and freezing into the frigid earth.

Yellow jacket wasps crackled angrily
like electric shocks around the containers of meat,
and an oily bucket of entrails shimmied
as a tremor from palsied hands shook his elbow.

Back in the bayou he called home at last,
the hunter unloaded his kill.
He’d traveled far for the elk,
all the way north to Alaska’s tundra.

The naked, dangling lightbulb
overhanging his open carport
lit the winding path to his tiny shack,
a return to the early fall warmth of home.