Leslie Adrienne Miller

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.

Anatomie des parties de la génération, Paris, 1773 What have they done to deserve this beauty? Did they, like Marsyas, invite some knife- wielding god with petty transgressions, the crime of a few tunes on Athena’s lost flute? Or were they simply too poor for deep graves, locked gates, and good husbands to watch over the mounds of new soil tossed toward them and their hunted unborn? Whoever they were, they’re still with us, posing demurely in suits of blood and muscle, the bruised shadows of what skin they do have, purpling like crushed petunias as they spread their legs and raise their meaty arms to show dissected breasts, unfinished infants, sundry viscera on the ground about their feet as if this were Thanksgiving and they cornucopias stuffed with squash and fruit. And who delivered their sentences? Surely not the muses who, at least, let them keep rococo faces. In 1773 the womb and the brain were the last outposts of the body to be mapped. D’Agoty bought the rights to Le Blon’s technique of printing mezzotints and gave these ladies homes in scientific texts, but anatomists believed D’Agoty’s prints too gorgeous to be accurate. Perhaps that’s why they open other wounds so easily in us. All so like the single rabbit I downed at twenty with a borrowed rifle, and then was obligated to see skinned, first scoring the length of the spine, then peeling the fur in one steaming piece, while the perverse uncle who clearly desired to touch me, instead held up a dripping pelt in one hand, and in the other, a flayed carcass still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.

He arrives in the courtyard with two cartons of juice, each of which he’ll tip and drain at one go in the heat, and a sack of food for the roses. He looms over his tools, blond and dusty as a stalk of ripe wheat, surely someone’s prized lover. Centuries bask among his hybrid teas, and he shakes his capable handfuls of food into their beds until nothing but roses nose the blues between lake and garden, lake and sky, the lapse of lawn where a party could be if those who lived here once returned to pour the wine. She’d be the sort to tuck a bud behind her ear, and he to catch one in his teeth. But alas, we’re guests of the present, expectant and sultry; all graciousness is fled, and rain fills the spent blooms, tumbles their tops, weighted with ruffles and shocks of pink. The gardener too disappears with his breeches the color of mustard and cinched with a string, gone back into the pages of Hardy or Lawrence. Perhaps, he’ll appear again Tuesday next, but he won’t look any of us living in the eye.

Rocked in my mother’s pregnant amble, and born into forty-five years in the dark, the egg this child was also swayed in the arts of lovers I took before you, fed with me in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year to new waves of wander, fish and flower, liqueur of each region, and bread of each village, each cup of moonlight in the long sward between my window and the Wannsee. The egg he was heard and voices of everyone I desired and held itself in some deep hormonal bloom, taking whatever was remarkable in my life into its possibility. We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain, to listen for the rumble of wild boar in the Malvan woods. We climbed into planes bound for cities we’d never visit again and skin we’d summon with sobbing. And so, my husband, as you dream of owning this child, remember that he has ridden in my fire, bathed in my blood, and sipped at the breath I drew the first time I saw what Rodin had clawed from stone before he turned from Claudel and went home for dinner and a clean shirt. Remember that this child is collage of everything before you, frangipani and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes of macaroni, and French cherries from an old woman in Auvergne who insisted on the gift because it was so marvelous to see a woman traveling alone.