Peter Munro: “Through the Stars, a Predator”
THROUGH THE STARS, A PREDATOR
On his outside he wears an inner squalor.
His true dolor holds still, freezing midstride
like a wide-eyed doe downwind of a killer.
His creature’s colors blend in and she resides
in open fields, dependent on the cryptic
that wildcats be tricked. And the unconcealed
dawn steals across him as if some mystic
spectre or construct, leaving him revealed.
He kneels and prays. Who answers him comes howling
or silent, cowled about with mist. She cracks rays
to rainbow displays of him and the scowling
face he vows is not his for its fractured praise.
There, spectra, broken on his skin, lie shabby.
And every scab of light corrodes into smoke,
a blue brokered by some mystic whose scabbard
rang, who stabbed him through the stars with a blind stroke.
Peter Munro is a fisheries scientist who works in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Seattle. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Iowa Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Passages North, Cortland Review, Comstock Review, Rattle, The Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, Prime Number, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.