to your grandmother’s couch. You grew

to resemble him, your broad back straining

your T-shirts. How you hated your body

in the pictures you showed me, eyes screwed

tight against the sun, tiny beside your cousin

bearing down on you as he fumbled with a shoe,

your smiling grandparents, the Kobuk’s

black waters slapping a sun-bleached dock.

You never told. Vowels dissolved inside the walls

of other vowels: a labyrinth of sound

from which a boy would have to spool

out thread to escape. Pain’s underground

of sense: shadowy maze where all language

is inadequate. What could you have said?

And how, explaining, would you have enlivened

that scene and self you most hated, imagined

them again by the force of saying it aloud?

To thrust yourself back into those hands, the cousin

clawing at his belt, that almost-human screech

to the screen door slamming behind you at the cabin—

Where, above the tree line, bristling and stark,

an owl cries, quartering, hunting the dark.

Fear of sex made you fear me. That look

you shot, after the film where the actress shies,

asked if she mistrusts her lover. The shook

head, the lie only I caught in the tilt of her eyes.

“No,” she said—

It enraged you when I saw

what you didn’t, worried one night I’d turn

and insist you’d hurt me. My body with its small,

waiting betrayals you could not fathom,

my sex you saw as a trap, which I did not

despise in you but pitied: the muscled weight

you shouldered into, that bulk you learned to carry

like your cousin, I said once, ignorant

of resemblance’s meaning, why so suddenly

you’d recoil from me, flinching as if struck.

Once, fixing our car’s engine, the white hood slipped

and your shoulder took its brunt, hunched

to catch the metal’s glinting hinge, to stop

what would have snapped my wrist

in half, your quickness like that of a hawk’s

launched at a rattler’s coiling length.

The bruise I watched rise those days

along your shoulder blade: livid, a chalk-

yellow fringed with green like the rind

on a peach’s blooming pink. Then that meaty

purple, rich as plums: a damson stain wine-

dark and velvet I put my mouth to, to taste

your skin’s heat, your blood so close as to come

up throbbing through my tongue.

In dreams, someone calls me in the woods.

But when I turn it isn’t you, just the pocked

face of a stranger, shirt and breath gin-soured,

body a grunting weight that knocks

the flight right out of me, pins me to the ground

when I try to run, one rough touch rooting

me in place. My limbs grow numb, bark-sheathed

and pale under the grasping fingers, shoots

of hair twined to hawthorn lances

that cut his knuckles, blood sprays

of winter berries spangling my branches