Desert Island

Choose three things and my first choice would be a gun.
Because that’s one less wound, one less weapon lying around
the place from which I was plucked, as if this casual question-
game could thought-experiment its way out of want for violence.
In this scenario, the expectation would be to hunt, to find
some careless creature and carry on by way of necessity,
as if taking a life was the only way to continue within one.
If I chose gardening gloves next and my favorite painting
of the sky, would you call me out for cheating, for being
too close to home? Because reality relies on perspective:
the sky looks different at different times of day,
but so can a painting: blues kind of brown, kind of gray,
colors tossing themselves atop sea-soft sheets of high tide.
Each morning, a new gun makes its way to shore.
Night-waves ferry them inland like recurring dreams
of exit signs. Chekhov taught us what to expect
and statistics confirm it over and over again—
that hunger never quits. In other words, forget the gun.
Maybe my first choice will be a basket. I’ll search for berries
and pray their juices look enough like blood when
the others come. It is fresh land after all. And men, I know,
are always looking for new things to destroy.