His form half-disappeared like the hind
legs of your childhood. Like its hooves.
The moose—whose body is now
a stone fireplace with a smoked-
over hole at the heart—stares
elsewhere. One glance at his glass eyes sets
your trigger-finger twitching. It's
not a gun snug against your thigh,
just your pulse that holsters
a memory: that boy with the fetish who'd beg
to suck your eyeball. You'd offer
the roll of your right eye, then
the left one's plush. His tongue
tipped with nicotine flicked your veins
a wilder red. You did this, sitting
on the brick wall of the abandoned
bread factory as scattered pigeon spines
vertebraed the mapleleaf viburnum. The flock
once flooded the chain-linked ryegrass
among blue dumpsters, cooing for crusts.
Now the kick of vinegar sours up
from the coral sauce on your rack of ribs,
and you sit with your past's camouflage sliding
off in drops like a season. Like the one
the moose head remembers, which is
why the hunters must've craned his neck
to the right before they stuffed it. A light
snowfall, a starveling ginkgo. So he wouldn't
scare off customers with the snipe
of his stare. So they hung him there,
the rest of him invisible. Who knows
how long he's looked back.