There’s something black in the green part of your eye
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We were not country people, so John, when he was a boy,
thought one Christmas that we could rent a shotgun just to shoot down mistletoe

from the levee sugarberries, rent it for half a day
like anything else we would use once: mandibles of a gear puller,

or a wedding tent’s white canvas cloud, through which, like swifts,
tuxed & tailed, black figures disappeared. He said we could stand all day

tossing rocks up at the mistletoe, parable of the fools,
I thought, & watch them drop down. As if that’s where they came from,

he said. Years later, in Montreal, I would see one girl leaning over
another, giving her a shotgun. What we called it when we were kids.

Smoke blown through the rolled, reversed tube of a spleef,
red coal inside the shooter’s mouth, the passive recipient nodding

Yes. The black hair of the first was thrown forward over the other’s face.
I remembered someone I had known. We would close our eyes that way,

as in kissing. Sometimes they were open & we would make out
the iris’s pond-water brown & the green particulate light, flecks

suspended, & our own pupils dark enough to see, tintype
in oval, our own faces in. She said once that she was always hungry.

I looked at her, thin under a brother’s shirt. She said she didn’t know
why she said that. I looked away. She was no one I loved or kissed

enough to think I loved, but someone I drove to the river with,
summer gone & the grass deep in her lungs thick smoke in a stream;

& she, her lips this close to mine, would have had enough of it
soon, the corner of a bag & paper without gum twisted to burn

popping along its seedy run, its high, heat, & our rushing blood
like embarrassment coming over us. & once there was no reason but happiness,

I suppose, & the gun she had with her from the trunk of her car,
but I let go straight up with a .410 blast & the birds went, in one rush, mute,

the two of us stunned, smoke the gray in her green eyes drifting
& then shot like the hard mizzle of sleet falling. Later that day she kissed me

between two rooms of her old house. She said, Don’t worry,
you won’t have to marry me. We laughed. It was something her sister had said

to me once when we were all lit—just when a door left open
slammed shut by a draft, muffled report from the inside the house;

that door one of those heart pine slabs that come unhinged,
made that way so a body could go cold & then be carried out.