They weren’t what I imagined, the woods dank with old water, too spoiled
really, if I’m being honest. And I want to be honest, especially with the woods.
Woods, who are supposed to be earnest and enveloping, like the ones of my
childhood, which made easy magic of being a mile away from home where
the survey tape strings spun around the silver-gray scalped furrows of maple
trunks like perky anklets, bouncing on the frigid zephyrs, underneath my palm,
were soaked through, threads sluicing the skin. This is the call of the boundary:
strands marking our trees and then our neighbor’s. The ones my German
short-haired pointer knew not the difference between and was promptly shot
by the gun in the neighbor’s hands. He’d warned us, so he said. We should
have seen it coming when he called us to the woods, to heft our dead dog
onto the blue tarp we used to cover the split wood from rain, to drag him back
to the space between the pony shed and burned-down barn. It was a hard winter
rife with deer meat for dinner, and damn that dog loved to run deer. And I get it.
I do. Even as that’s what ended him—the feeling of sprinting through the dense
forest rising all around, weaving between the trees, the crisp scent of icy loam
hanging below the mouth where your body becomes its own thread that binds
the woods together. The scent of the deer hot in your nose. I know it well—
that lust, the chase, the tracing down to a clandestine bed far within the wild
blackberries, softened by the belly of our deepest wanting. And when I dream,
I want to be Luger, that was his name (His name the name of a gun, and
was it fate he was killed by a gun, we could never say for sure, but the fact never
escaped me, the fact it was and feels important, that he was tied by name
to violence, and even before he died, to the unloving way in which the needles
of the porcupine were ripped from his nose and days after he bled and licked
the blood from his face, wagging what was left of his lopped off tail, part
phantom limb that steadied his body), it’s because I dream of being more than
just my body too, of the way he disappeared into the undulating wheat. It was
something to see: the blur of his liver roan physique, the pepper of his ticking
while he galloped, four legs airborne, gliding nearly, the beauty of his cadence,
and I’m crying now thinking of how no one cried when he was killed, or when
we buried him angry, or when we walked into the woods to try to find where
he died, where he crawled to, belly on the ground, whimpering, sniffing
for a spot to make tender, to soften with his breath, the place where we would
meet him beneath the luminous maple lines, the ground beneath him gone cold
but greening. His eyes open, an extinguished yellow. It wasn’t what we were
expecting. It wasn’t. And I want to be honest about that. I do. The sky above
us held no visible sun, just a density of ashy cloud, a fog from the ground
to the canopy. How alone we were out there, miles from any main street,
miles from any neighbors, except for when it came to marks between our land.
Their trees and ours, as sugar season, our own hungers, come to remind us.