Puma, Cougar, Panther, Mountain Lion
Hancock Hill, on one of whose
northern flanks our house rests,
is not one but several hills
bunched together and separated
by arroyos choked with yucca,
cholla, prickly pear, and whitebrush.
Yesterday, two hikers emerged
from the arroyo near the dumpsters
beside our street, their eyes still wide
from their sighting of two fresh
mule deer kills a half-mile or so
from our house. Local naturalists,
they could tell by the way
the carcasses were ravaged
the kills were the work of a lion.
As they drove away, I pondered
the countless nights it must,
in hunger, have circled our acre,
inching silently through the darkness
on the pliant black pads of its paws,
the circles of its stealth shrinking
with each soft, deliberate step,
tightening the noose of wilderness
around the dewy-eyed throat of our sleep.
Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, has published several award-winning and critically acclaimed collections of poems, most recently TheLobsterman’s Dream (Poems of the Coast of Maine), El Grito del Lobo Press, Fulton, MO, 2014. His New and Selected Poems (Texas Christian University Press, 2008) was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award. Thomas has two chapbooks forthcoming later this year or in early 2015: The Goatherd (Mouthfeel Press, El Paso, TX) and Art Museums (Blue Horse Press, Los Angeles, CA). He lives with his wife, Lisa, in Alpine, Texas.