Post-Op Letters in the Field Between Us

Dear M——

Today I forgot what it was

I went looking for, my own face,

or the shape of something

I should love. I just watched

the leaves gather around my feet,

their small dead selves lighter

now, unselved. Perhaps this is

part of it, a willingness

to forget the way the world

has touched our bodies sharply,

so we can refill ourselves with

someone else: someone who

doesn’t start every time

she hears a distant saw, who doesn’t

feel her legs as wooden rot.

I want to be the kind of woman

who has one story and it’s a good one,

and it starts like this:

once, I was in the dark woods.

Here’s one version I know

instead: nothing ever happens

once. The woods are everywhere.

The woods are rife with men

and saws and knives.

Once, the trees were alive.

~

Dear S——

Today I started walking where the trees were alive,

still stitched to their leaves, still humming, still houses

for musky warm and wild things who out-breathed all

the men and all their knives. And yes, the woods were dark,

but nothing ever happens once, and so they didn’t stay

that way: the sun came up on all that had survived

and there I was, somehow among their number, still

dragging the same legs, still finding buckshot caught

behind my tendons, braced for new machines

I might hear readying to go to work on all my flesh.

S, it turns out we can last a long time with our legs

bent, make it for miles crawling on our hands.

A callus forms, we grow a shell. In curling downward

it is easier to press our ears right to the ground,

hear that, beneath it all, where leaves and marrow

wear down and wear out, there’s water running.

Once, the woods were something else.

~

Dear M——

There are so many ways

our faces are beyond recognition,

so many ways I’ve failed to see

myself in the world, or failed

to see the world in me,

though I’ve folded the woods

and the river into my arms, my chest,

so that I might be wrecked again,

so that I might be made

into another wild thing

the world forgets. I don’t think

we’ll ever recognize a place

as ours, as built for us, unless

it’s one we make out of the ashes

of the next best thing, a nest

that’s empty and shaped

by all the birds before us. Even

the raft wasn’t made for us,

but of us, our bodies unable

to carry themselves but made

to carry everything else. When

I open my hands, I’m never surprised

by the birds they turn into, how

quick they are to take a thing

apart to see what holds it up.

Take a little string, some straw,

a piece of bark. Whatever it is

we carry into each clearing,

let’s hold it up and squint

until it turns into a face we know,

a house we’ve loved, a wrecked

and empty nest, a place the birds

have made for someone else

then left.

~

Dear S——

The birds our hands become

are the ones with holes cut

in their cores so you can see

right through them to the world

they’re leaving into: little globe

of cloud, or rusted brush, or green held

steady there between their bones while

they go on building and unbuilding

their homes from what was there already,

unspooling the string and tearing through

the air like they are not torn through,

like what’s a wound was always

meant to be a window. I open my hands

and watch them work until they’re out of sight.

In one clearing, we settle down just for a night

with what the birds have left behind,

in another, our hands make an aperture

somebody sees the sky through.

~

~

Dear S——

At the bottom of the riverbed

the ground is dry as all the shards

of bone we buried and unburied there.

I puzzle skeletons together from

the bleached scraps we wrenched loose,

trying to make an animal of what

they left us with when it was over.

I know I’m glowing from the artificial

stars they pumped us bright with,

that the rivers in my wrists are running

violet before they calcify. I’m leaking light.

I stain the things I touch. I lie down

in what is just a canyon now and,

watching from above, they use my

growing constellations to map out

the world they’ve made: pin down

the North, my waning water, what’s

worth saving, how a good war spreads.