Getting the Rooster

My God! My God! Has it always been so?
Walking to the kitchen for a drink of water
and coming back with fish tagine leftovers.
Take the other day. I went down to the fenceline
swearing under my breath I'd get that rooster.
Every morning the call to prayers at four dark
by that feathered tin trumpeter in the guava.
How many times I stood clear of his backside
hands on my hips like my old grandmother
muttering promises to cut his scratchy warbling
and dismantle the acoustic tunnel that amplifies
his broken serenade right up to our own bedroom window
and other post-neolithic thoughts on hunting
for reasons other than food. So I reach the scene
bend under the weeping bamboo and behold
the makings of the male of the species who on seeing me
tries to run through the small squares of the cage
by defining the inner dimensions of the rectangular cuboid
with his feathery mass and some rather potent instincts
potent because instinct caromed off my own instinct
while captor and captive eyed each other
as if the horizons hadn't been stitched together
with telephone poles and sagging wires quite yet
and the background roar was not really a motorcycle
but a rather greater point of view who might
quickly reverse the situation with me suddenly
defining other sorts of dimensions and so on
but I was not interested in the kill certainly not.
Did he know this? If so he had a strange way
of showing his understanding of relocation
by speeding up till he became a brown blur
with a bit of red in it.
There was a moment when I hesitated I must say
as I studied his diminutive crest and asked him
are you a chicken or da kine? which is local for
"really annoying rooster who crows at godawful hours of day or night"
when to my horror—I do have some left after a lifetime
of intermittent exposure to American television—
I saw the zebra dove belly-up on the floor of the trap.
If I needed further proof I had my man this was it.
I promptly loaded my victim and his victim
into the back of my black pickup though in a pang
strapped the cage down for the ride
and high-tailed it up to Pu'u Hue—a nearby deserted mountainscape
well known to catch-and-release volunteers like myself.
The shabby counterfeit of Chanticleer and I gave each other hard looks
before I set one end of the trap against the wide gate
slid open Freedom's door of twisted wire, watched and listened
as the creature threw caution and dignity to the wind
and waddled furiously in the straightest line
I've ever seen taken by a bird on foot, almost to the horizon
clucking and hiccupping from clump to clump of thick grass
and I stood there marveling awhile at high cirrus clouds above,
painted bark eucalyptus lounging on their elbows below.
The air seemed pure and clean. My conscience likewise.
I turned for home key in hand sensing a sharp pang
as if the absence would never replace the palpability
of direct experience as if I had sown the seeds of separation
and now all there was left was what? The post mortem
wondering if I'd gotten the right guy? How would I know
until I lay awake that very night listening for something
to return? Unless something had never left.
But the cage was not empty yet.
I shook out the dove. Getting down on one knee
I noted the surgical hole over the heart.
Even if that wasn't the right guy
I'm glad I got him. Or was I? Or did I?
It was me lured them both in the trap with scratch from Takata's Store.
I cast the innocent victim into the long grass
and went down the road without looking back.