Weaning

I. Deer Season

The quiet of windows pours its sand in my ear.

What, what? ask the dolls of evening

though they do not wish to hear my answer.

Five hens are alive in the brush, purring

toward the slough. No one here has a rifle

but the wind turns abruptly and returns a report.

Three bright orange vests hang at the ready.

The doe turns in her frame above the stove,

and her season climbs like the moon into its place

in the sky’s clock. The green theater

with its elegant aspens goes more threadbare

each week, so I’ll soon see the others, heretofore

only heard. Just to the south the casino lights

ride the underbellies of clouds, and further

down the interstate more world twirls

in its paper and drinks, while the baby throws

his feet through the bars, and the father

takes him like a little canoe on the billowy

lake of his chest. Comes a mewling, then,

from my dark, a mooing, a whine, feathered

or furred I can’t divine. The girl with the flat face

and bleached lips read her poems in crisp

Ivy League whatnot, but I got sidetracked

by the way her torso seemed stacked, pressed

in layers like shale, so there was a weight to her

that hung in the bottom of the eye like the bulk

of a tear that never quite falls. It’s true

the intelligence was clear as green ice, and just

as hard, stripped of its I and heat. Her baby

burbled on in the back of the room happily not

in the poems. Oh little rabbit of grief on the spot

where the last dog was turned under, don’t speak.

I make a fire, then dream a fire: wind carries

its gray rags into the woods, and the crackling

in the grate enters my ducts, wakes me.

When I look out, the grass along the fence

is crawling with light, and the last wild asters

press their blue buttons into the cold glass.

II. The New Year

Zero and a fine hard snow burns

when it hits bare skin. A white

ridge glows inside the birches

across the slough where snow articulates

the distance. Where water moves,

where the land heaves. I haul oak chunks

in a plastic sled. When I bend to stack

the splits, my breasts pop and burn,

and my child’s face rises like a bird

razoring its shadow over the snow.

Wind takes the rag of some old self

and shakes it at me. The heart is only

another shape the view stretches to include.

Birches march out of the hardwoods

with their white waists radiant, so many

clones on one taproot. A jay circles

the full feeders fending off smaller birds.

I make this vocal gesture because self

is simply one edge of me. Out here

there’s only an economy of wood burned

or to be burned, how much water’s left

in the tank, how hard or soft the light.

Degrees and drafts. This room and everything in it

are mine, and though I try to be selfish and grim,

my child has made me enduringly plural,

more than I, but not quite we.

Black-capped chickadees flee

from three big jays at the feeder. Shrieking

and diving in the strong winter light, the jays

are not actually blue. Their feathers refract light

so they appear blue. Self-luminous,

hardy and belligerent as pronouns.

III. Easter

The kick of the screw finding purchase in pine

slams my wrist bone, elbow and shoulder,

but it’s in, and the panel is up. Now another

and another until the wall is flush. I mark

and cut each length with the small tooth

of the new jigsaw my husband thought

I should have. Two days apart from him

and the child, I’ve forgotten the pump

to empty my breasts, so the saw’s jump

at the end of the cut draws the burning

up. And with it a guilt as bright as the room

where I drive plank after plank against the studs,

each a satisfaction against the body’s wish

to be elsewhere. Even into the night, I can’t put

down my drill. I stoke the fire and drive

more screws, loving the growl when they’re

in as far as they’ll go. The mind arranging

which planks and trim tomorrow, next week

and spring. Even my sleep is a cutting and fastening

broken by my turning on the full globes

of my breasts. So toward morning I dream

of parties given by women I used to know,

and to which I’m not and will never be invited,

trays of fancy sandwiches and petit fours,

half moon glasses of seething champagne.

Source: The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf Press, 2007)