Free Lunch--Poem, "Arrow," R. T. Smith

White as a winter hawk's underfeathers,
the yearling stands, glass-eyed, shocked still
from the spotlight, atop a chipped chifforobe
in Brinson's Antiques, where Henry says,
"The story's even worse. The fellow shot him
from the porch with a Shakespeare compound
bow. He was eating petals and leaves
from the rose of Sharon at the far edge
of their garden. Those people, though, I tell you
they were hard. they had him stuffed
down here in a week. I have never seen one
so pale, a ghost before the spinning broadhead
hit him," and I'm getting sentimental myself,
the creature snowy but fraying already,
his ears cocked back like twin hammers
of a sporting gun, tail tucked, muzzle and eyes
alert in death and inside him so much dust
from a sawmill or something more modern
and, as Henry says, "worse." "It's where
we're going," he adds. "All of us. I know
any man has a right and duty to defend
his ornamentals, and animals will devour
whatever's in their path; we've whacked
their wild woods back to almost nothing.
Still, when you see one this lovely,
it's easy to switch allegiance." Looking up
at the stunning color and visible stillness,
I wonder aloud, "Who had the heart to send
the shaft into that easy prey?" And then,
"How much you asking?" He squints, looks
hard at the facsimile of a living hunger.
"Now that you say it aloud like that, not for sale."