Fairy Tale Review

I do not want to be a chrysalis again.I stand on all fours, my furlike a million flowers on fire—a newborn animalnot quite earthbroken.Watching, youwho has never understood mesee how sorrow canlet us be wild and free,not to forget, but to remember.Planets howl.The earth drips through uslike spilt dye from a rock.Your hands glow like milk in the dark.I will devour you,tongue long and purple as an anteater’sand walk a long time in the woods. [End Page 52]

I drink until my eyesfog with you,my first lover,

who told meI was an unopenedroot system.

I wanted, for a long time, to be anythingwildgoodby which I mean

what no other can know.Blood memory:it felt like a barn

openingin my two hands.The endless ground under us.

I’m that person who can’t stopasking to be bent, taken by firelight.I lie here now as I once lay

as in here I am, here I am. [End Page 53]

What were we meant to find?When your hand is on my knee

like a crooked arrowdragging itself through the dark,

what can I offer?I slip your hand under my skirt

to greenery.—The brief momentsmosses. What heat is this in me

cracking to bend an arrowagain,

again,again? [End Page 54]

I’ve been down a road once that led to a river that led to a stream that ledto an open field where the horizon was only broken by a single house

and since then I’ve been lost in thinking about it—the caved-in roof,porch sagging, owners long dead, silent husk of a house.

I told you about it once, and you told me about the summer you spentbaling hay while the girl you liked watched from her house:

porch swing swaying back and forth, yellow hair, a dog at her feet. I  wonderif you ever saw me like that—a moment of breath in the heat, a house

for your heart. Months, now, since that night when I was drunk and  hopefulon your couch, sweating, A/C broken, while rain fell outside the house.

You’ve been quiet since then, and the rain doesn’t comeexcept for brief storm-bursts that batter both our houses.

I haven’t told you about the things I’ve done with my body since then—since you traced it like a wound in the sky, like a farmhouse

blaring light in the middle of acres of night. How I wished I could  unknow you,and, wishing, spent night after sweat-soaked night in another man’s  house.

And still I come back to that sagging shack in the field where I found,for the first time and so long ago, the filament of my desire, housed

in the remnants of another lived life. It would have been nice, I think,if that had been us—alone in a field, just you, me, a dog, maybe, a house. [End Page 55]