The Hunting Gun

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I PUBLISHED A POEM titled “The Hunting Gun” in the most recent issue of The Hunter’s Friend, a floppy little magazine put out by the Japan Hunters’ Club.

Hearing this one might suppose that I am at least slightly interested in hunting, but in fact, having been raised by a mother with a violent dislike of all forms of killing, I have never so much as held an airgun in my hands. It just so happens that the editor of The Hunter’s Friend is a high-school classmate of mine, and when he heard that even now, at my age, I haven’t outgrown the habit of publishing my somewhat idiosyncratic poems in a privately printed journal some of my poet friends and I put out, he asked if I would contribute a piece to his magazine. Presumably he was only being polite, suggesting this on a whim as a way of making up for our having been out of touch for so long. That’s all it was. Ordinarily I would have demurred without a moment’s hesitation, seeing as the magazine focused so narrowly on a topic with which I had no connection, and because he had stipulated that the poem had to deal in some way with hunting; but as chance would have it I had recently been led to feel a certain poetic interest in hunting guns and their relationship to the solitude of the human condition, and I had just been thinking that I should write something on the topic one day. His magazine seemed like the best possible venue for such a work, so one night late in November, at that time of the year when the air finally starts growing painfully cold, I sat at my desk past midnight composing a sort of prose poem, after my own fashion, which I then mailed the next day to the editorial office of The Hunter’s Friend.

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