Wing Hunt

Late August, when the light pares down but deepens, condensing like a liquid distilled, I long to pick tomatoes that grow in my mother’s garden, the stems all staked and tangled, gold bunches bowed nearly to the dirt, though to pick them is at once to have and to lose, the way even a wish takes something with it coming true.

I am not moving, and you are not moving, and the day hangs between those hours when the light barely turns, but all I want to say is, “Wait.”

Some days I wish I could break myself apart and give each piece away, the way we used to trade lumps of sea glass or handmade valentines, things that, once given, only know the loyal dark of drawers, or else the love that is the same as recognition whenever they are brought again to light.

I am cleaning the blood from your clothes, tiny drops leaked from where the doctor sampled your skin, my hands turning to paper as I scrub and rinse and scrub again, thinking of how loss doesn’t always look like much, how it can even just look like laundry.

The world does not end when I say your name, though I can feel the ground consider it, the sky mulling it over, a vibration that throbs like a thousand rocks cracking, a smell that promises decades of rain, even if they couldn’t sustain rage so deep, even if neither could I.

I watch you and don't know what to call what you are doing, except maybe building, even if all I see are fragments of words and numbers, and every once in a while, a scroll unleashed in staccato speed, unless you are doing what all of us do when we write or speak, when we move our hands, not so much creating as approximating something else, like shaping a bridge out from its center, and the gorge it spans so wide it can never reach both edges.

We were not our own those many years we walked the woods, following paths that looped and joined together, that swallowed their own beginnings, and I miss it just the same sometimes, the tiers of light and leaves, the burrow holes frosted with hidden creatures’ breath, though missing can only come with forgetting, since we felt what we thought was free there under the trees and sky, but the only way we moved was in circles.

They tell me he isn’t coming back, that I should go before dark, and I nod even while I stare at the sky, watching the way it moves but never goes away, and how, when all the trees and hills go black, it shines.

So many nights, I have looked for the moon, and the moon isn’t there, though I do not blame it, at least not how we blame each other for only being who we cannot help but be, meanwhile the moon is somewhere else, still tugging on the sea, the way we once tugged on sleeves until we knew what hands could do.

You had already left by the time we sowed the garlic, the bulbs all rustling like desiccated hearts till we peeled and split them open, burying each tear-shaped clove, not too shallow or too deep, the November dirt cold and crystalline with frost, and all that winter ahead to wait for something to grow.

I didn’t mind the way you never cut the grass behind your house or that the only flowers growing there were wild, all of them gangly and greedy for the light, their blooms too small but shaped like stars, though you wouldn’t say if it meant some lack of shame, or if you saw more wilderness when you looked at me.

If years are measured by number and speed, I may not be equal to the ones I’ve lived, since I never paid attention to ways of entering, only ways of looking, the way I never paid attention to doors, only windows, falling in love with each square punched out of the dark, with that warmth the color of all remembered light, or else the flickering, shallow sea blue of soundless televisions, wanting almost to touch them, but like spider’s webs or dandelion clocks, wanting even more to let them be.

He reached out to catch the fringe of her dress, but she was already off, legs growing taller with each step, till the last he saw was her clearing the faintest of hills faded into the distance with a single vault.

You are wearing your tree skin again, that rough coat thickened with lichen and burls, impervious to any weather except perhaps the lightning that fizzes beneath my fingernails, hot enough to split the whole of you, if what I wanted was only that.

It took two wheels and a pair of shrieking brakes to know that you were most present when you were gone, that the caving in my chest wasn’t love, but lack, since wind and speed feel like nothing but themselves, and they drag on everything we do not need.

You said there were still pictures of your brothers there, tacked up in trailers cracked and rusting in the woods, and it wasn’t the shards of glass that scared us, not when we were the kind of girls who wanted scars to show the boys they couldn’t hurt us, but the smell of molded fabric and metal leaching into the ferns, the way it seemed like nothing ever grew except out of ruin.

Each time he built a house, he told her that he went out and listened to the trees he was to fell, and she thought for years he must be daft or strange in some small way, except for the thrum every now and then of envy in her chest, though of him or the sound of leaves, she couldn’t say.