Sing me the old songs.
Tell me the stories of times gone by.
I want to spend an evening or so with you to hear about your dogs.
I want to see your guns.
I want to read your favorite books.
I want to warm my hands in front of your fire and try
your pipe tobacco and taste your whiskey.
I want to see the old brown pictures you’ve always saved.
The pictures of the stern-faced men wearing hipboots and brown overalls with rusty wool caps pulled down over their eyes.
The pictures of men who wore neckties
and soft flannel shirts and breeches
and leggings standing by braces of
still-necked, rib-spring pointers with the
quail wagons behind them.
I want to see yourself in a
blue work shirt buttoned at the neck with your kitchen haircut
and your .22 and that
big-eyed pup.
Do you remember all the names?
Tell me about them.
Talk to me about the horses.
Talk to me about the dogs.
And the L. C. Smith, The Parker, the Baker, the Lefever and the Ansley H. Fox.
Tell me about the cold and the wind and the sea and the river and the kettle pond.
Fill my mind with pictures of your prairies, your swamps, your sedge fields, your mountains and your endless plains.
Tell me too, about the times you didn’t shoot
for some sweet secret reason of your own.
I want to hear the stories about Charley and Jimmy and Ed.
Could they build a fire?
Did they get lost?
Could they track?
Make me laugh with the stories about the day Irv never got a shot and
old Belle brought him a quail, still warm, she’d found and put in his hand.
Let me hold the puppy on my lap.
Let me scratch the old dog’s belly while she warms her backside by the fire.
Fill my glass again and pass me the wooden bowl with the apples in it.
Talk to me about the bee tree cutting.
Tell me how deep the ice pond was.
Show me how you call ducks.
Tell me how you make a rabbit stew.
Who was the best shot you ever saw?
Who always got his buck?
What’s your favorite excuse of all the ones you’ve heard?
Why is it, do you suppose, that men have stopped telling lies the way
they used to do.
Take me with you to the places with the names I like.
Take me to the Superstition Mountains where the whitewing and
mourning doves come in flights like feathered clouds.
Take me along the gentle curvings of the Tombigbee.
Show me bighorn sheep that feed above the Prophet River.
And the elk along the Yellowstone.
And The Badlands bear picking berries.
And the woodcock flighting to the Merrimack.
And the wild turkeys in the Dismal Swamp.
Time does not exist where these things never change.
Listen . . . don’t you hear the same quail call and mallard
stutters as the men in the faded brown pictures?
Sing me the old songs.
Tell me the stories of times gone by.