Controlled burns are still legal in some places, smoke so thick
we can't see the mountains until we're between them and even then
we refuse to acknowledge all of this takes an enormous amount
of forgiveness: the turtle I ran over at the beach, its guts spilled out
all over the asphalt–cooking for the feast of seabird–the
stretch of intestine
from road to beak to sky. How a bird stomach can digest a
whole fish. How I once
rode a horse with a sway back and regret it. In every relation
ship there are things
that can't be said. You tell me: write about fire without using
the word fire.
Some directions are impossible. We cross the Missouri, into
the high prairie
of the Sioux and I can feel the land ache, attempt to hide itself
and then spread wide in reluctant reception. The way soft
folds of earth
seem to squeeze and release like a plug pushed into the holy source
of breath. Your letters are the only letters I ever saved. I still
find them
tucked away in old books, on shelves no one uses, except me.
As if I knew
I would need them one day but didn't know for what. Eventually
we'll spend less time examining our faults. I don't consider the
fiction I read
fiction anymore. A black opium poppy grows alone on a farm in
Maryland
and no one can stop it. You've heard the rumor that the higher
the elevation,
the better the orgasm. I only mention this to you as an offer.
When we
are at sea level we walk so close to the ground it ends up swallowing
the best parts of our chest and after you die I want to open you up
and see what happens inside of all of that privacy, hollow out
your skull, sacrifice your brain to the packs of birds in southeastern
Wyoming, where the land stretches so far it bends and you
can see both
the sunrise and set in the course of a single day. Where I can finally
sit alone, cataloguing everything that bound you together
and quietly stitch your skin into a shroud.