I pawned my watch to buy that first shotgun,

the blued barrel out of the box and into the

brush, chasing after my neighbor who didn’t

much like work or making love to his wife in

any sort of quiet or genial way, at least as

far as we could tell from the clattering and

crashing we could hear through the onion

skin thin walls of that apartment on Law

Street, the same apartment where we watched

as the cops brought back our car, stolen out

of the gravel parking lot in the back, beneath

our smudged window, where we also gaped

as their grief played out, their girl child hit by

a car and the mother held the father’s hand,

even though we’d often heard them yell after

dark, and not like Delmar and his wife, but more

like they didn’t know they had a child who would

die under the heavy wheels of a driver racing

along a quiet neighborhood street on a weekend

when I was out hunting rabbits with my new gun,

no longer clear what time it was, nor what time

it would be when I got home to witness all this

calamity, the whole of it as a painting from an Old

Master, the sort that brings you in from above,

just to the side of where the trouble unfolds,

before you see that no one is ever as far off

to the side as they’d like to be, when the sound

of gunfire or sobbing or gravel under wheels

is all you can hear, whatever the neighbors

might be doing, before or after the dark.