beneath the beautiful slouch of the woman’s shoulder, one shoulder

to be exact, just where the shoulder and the upper arm meet,

beside the brimming breast

the bird shot through—

and the absence we had forgotten

came back;

and it was not, as one might expect, an insult, nor a disfigurement,

nor a lack;

not the deflowered sun-stricken bush swamping the broken

fountain, a stone flower thrusting out a long-dead pipe below

the woman’s feet;

not the sparrow’s foolhardy bravura that blasted him safely past the

woman’s breast and into the trees, only to impale him soon

after on the hound’s blunt tooth;

not the newborn rabbit outside the gate, ghastly pink, born too late

and bushwacked by the sudden uprising of the gardener’s

sprinklers that just as quickly dropped back and left the slick

creature trembling like the mayflies that live for one day only,

or like a young deer before a storm;

not an incapacity, nor a short-sightedness,

nor a tunneling of vision, the world narrowing down to this alley

between two rows of rotting trees that leads to a fetid pond,

screened by narrow grasses and blackened by sludge and a half-day’s dream;

not the small girl years ago when her arm went numb after she had

been swung and swung in a circle saying, when her mother

pressed the mute flesh, It is hiding, it is hiding, Mother,

(and what, had the arm been taken altogether, would the girl

have said, To a far country it has gone, Mother, it is lost and cannot find its way back?);

not the terrible draining at the center of the day when the spirit

topples like a statue to the grass, or like a woman who has

given blood and risen too quickly to her narrow feet;

not a shame,

not a word pronounced slowly and then spelled with great care

letter by letter all wrong into the dark beyond the stage, and

the following silence that flies back and attaches itself like a

dark bird to the brain;

not the hound with no sense of smell blundering blindly through

the woods or lying in the sun with his mouth slung open to

catch flies and stray birds;

not the flushed bloom of the ripe marigolds pulled up by the

hundreds and cast onto the gardener’s fire so that new flowers

can be put in and death beaten to the punch, the perfumed

smoke rising acrid as rotting fur;

not the wind butting its head against the garden wall like the boy

who long ago killed the bird or tore the cloth,

nor the remorse of the mother years later when she

remembers locking the door against him and realizes too late

that the fabric of the world—the sky itself, the trees, the garden

and its terrifying colors, the dusky texture of the boy’s hair—is

woven from rebuttals and embraces, takes on its hue, retains its