Beast-Lover Variations

1.

Always watering burdock and thistle,

bundling butter-and-eggs bouquets,

I missed the immaculate

angle of his approach. A cleverer girl

would have stayed home, tended to what

encroached, but his turning

unlatched me. I followed,

browsing on buffalo, goose and bearberries,

plucked pears from a vine. He touched

none, thorns never took to his thighs,

and we differed in other strains

I began to forget. I've filled rivers

with salmon, he said, tapped sweet

cactus juice, I have some tricks

to teach you—one with a hare, one with a vole,

one with a waning moon. My basket

thumping muzzle, dewclaw like a hunted

pulse against my hip, I was lapsing

into love. As many doorways

loomed as aspen pairs and I recalled

that I was not brave, not ever, and stopped

to sleep. My paths were meant to purl

gently downhill, spider webs brocade the brush,

fate be tractable. A cleverer girl

2.

would not have placed an even

number of huckleberries in every cobbler,

nor upended equal parts of nettles

and sage above her bed. But

I was wising up, and waking

by a stream I could name, I did not try to pick

my way home. I swam, my gullet

ice-plugged in the instant. Having pinned

aprons to a winter line, strung

barbed-wire fence, palmed the paw-sized

disc of snow inside a lynx track, I had mastered

cold work; I thought I could leave

anyone. Underwater was otherwise—

a granite thicket and billowing silt,

caddisfly cases and cut-banks,

a numbness that may have been him

coursing over me. No matter

how dearly I willed my floodgates

shut, I took on water like a buckshot

dory, a hungry bucket, a jam jar waiting

for weed blooms in a waiting house

like mine—I could only tumble

downstream with him who fed me

dozens of wings. A cleverer girl

3.

would not have mooned over

so many fine-lined maps, nor relished the heft

of atlases—knowing the planned-for lists

toward rupture before rapture,

she would have foreseen remorse

even in a town called Fishtail.

In the elephant-head meadow, I still

had my basket, brimming now with the most

bulbous of black ants, flax-pods and fat

crackling grasshoppers. My feeder's figure

turned black-and-white-winged

cartwheels and oh was I weary of change—

saying magpie, I said as much, inviting

him home. If I coveted age, I coveted a body

mooring mine to whichever eave

was ours—who he would be then

fretted me less than dwelling there. As far

as the cleverer girl, I ditched her, but saying

I was wary no longer would make

me a liar. An odd-berried cobbler

in the oven, I waited for faucets to spout

gravel, walls to fall and my traveled

basket to unravel as we sat together

astounding the eyes of my maple table.