I need to remember how to be a body, more than a chalk outline filled in with cedar shavings, doubt. I am not buried with you in the winter ground. Observe the lifeline on my left palm, how it wings out, how it bifurcates. The cadence of my body walking forward could be To Prove To Prove To Prove. All the mold I remember in hindsight. Fragile as I am, I feel divided by the shadow of a windmill rolling over a cornfield. To stand up & leave behind a life. Imagine how the match strikes, how a trashpile of blackbirds is consumed in paper & ashes, paper ashes. To explain: I can’t explain. I am paranoid about how much grief a tree can witness. That these woods grow older & never break their silence seems unfeeling. When I look back I see my skin shedding gray & red as it tunnels behind me. I don’t want anyone to cut it away from my heel. Rabbits on the lake road hold still as I approach. Predator I have never been. I don’t know what to do with my hands. But I travel with a wrongness any animal can see coming. If I startle these rabbits, I could stop their hearts—they could die of that shock. Or I may disappear the moment they stop looking. I’m breathing still. I wait for them to blink.

[EURYDICE]

Eurydice the tree is full of cicadas I hear them building their city of wet glass

hissing at night when the tree moves like hair when thousands of their bodies

pulse in the low-lit humid air pink in the streetlight when the first drops hit

& the line of rain follows like a wall of birds, walls off the whole bird-heavy sky.

There comes a point when you have to hold the man responsible for what he did.

I have decided it’s degrading to say I let him. I say my name into the open cellar

covering my eyes. I will lead myself out of it. A tree falls over my door but I don’t

touch it. I never could convince myself that the shell of those insects is only a shell.

After nine days of rain I don’t walk alone in the fields I don’t pick up the phone

when he calls me. How will I know myself? Hell-bitten—shade? He says I love only you

& every time a woman I know disappears down the long hallway of a bar with him I do not

say to her Couldn’t you trust me that if the man could stand to be loved I would have done it?

Come out into the new wet earth pull the leaves away from your skin Eurydice.

Ivy on the linden tree. River of pale trash rolling down Asher hill. Gutter flood.

I’m here in the hail-trampled yard. Bright landscape—our flecked debris. It’s ending