A rainbow in a puddle is lovely until you ask where the colors came from. Omar Willey's "Unseen Hunter" is built around that second thought. Its opening picture is gorgeous: concentric circles running through blue, red, gold and "golden brown." Yet the first words are "Spoors of industry," and they carry a warning. Judging by the imagery, the scene is something like a filmy sheen on wet ground, with rings spreading where rain lands, though the poem never names the pollutant. That withholding is its method. It shows us how the damage looks before it tells us what the damage is.
"Spoor" is a tracker's word for the trail an animal leaves behind. So industry starts out as the creature whose traces are being read, and the reader becomes the tracker. The title then reverses this by calling something an "unseen hunter," and the closing line, "Prey, unseen hunter," refuses to settle the matter. There are two nouns and a comma, with no verb to say who does what to whom. The most natural reading is that the land is the prey and industry the hunter who never shows itself, only its tracks. But the grammar lets the roles slide, and a reader who has admired the pretty circles may feel implicated.
The second stanza is where the beauty comes apart. "Rain" is a one-word sentence, and it lands like the drop it describes. Then the colors "bleed," a verb that works for running dye but also for a body. The palette that follows is drained of everything it had: blue becomes "dull puce," red becomes "anemic," gold shrinks to "pale amber." Puce is an unlovely little word, a muddy purple-brown, and "anemic" is a medical term for blood that lacks strength. By the time the poem says "Open wound," the colors have already been bleeding for several lines. The metaphor has been prepared by the vocabulary.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Short fragments and abrupt stops do the work instead. "Rain." "Open wound." Sentences break mid-line, so the reading stutters like a drip. The line breaks are carefully placed. "A small and silent" ends the second stanza, and "trickling" begins the third, so the sentence itself leaks across the white space. Even the word "flux" carries a double sense, since it means flow or change but is also an old medical word for a bodily discharge.
Sound shifts along with sense. The opening is soft and chiming, with "gold, golden" echoing like a widening ring and "then... then... then" counting the colors off. The last stanza hardens: "Metal quarry, pierced with points of stone" is full of clipped p, t and k sounds. "Quarry" holds two meanings at once, a pit where stone is cut and the animal being hunted, so the wounded ground and the wounded prey become the same thing. "Points of stone" may also recall ancient arrowheads or spear tips, which would fit the hunting language the poem started with. That is an inference, but it suits the poem's habit of letting one image do two jobs.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. In eleven lines it never preaches and never uses a word like "pollution." It lures us with color and lets the same colors sicken in front of us. The lesson is about looking. Beauty can be a symptom, and the most dangerous traces are the ones we are tempted to admire. The poem ends on a fragment with no neat conclusion, as if the hunter has once again slipped out of sight.