Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

love lasts by not lasting —Jack Gilbert I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings: lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces. This is not a story of return. There are times I wish I could erase the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays, my fervor to be touched by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek where I stand like a stranger to my life. There is no single moment of loss, there is an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard. Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

It’s right before you drive away: our limbs still warm with sleep, coffee sputtering out, the north wind, your hips pressing me hard against the table. I like it hard because I need to remember this. I want to say harder. How we must look to the road that’s gone, to the splayed morning of cold butter and inveterate greed. Light comes and goes in the field. Oranges in a bowl, garlic, radio. In the story of us, no one wins. Isolation is a new theme someone says. By now I’ve invented you. Most people don’t like to touch dead things. That’s what my friend tells me when I find my fish on the floor. It must have wanted an out. Sometimes my desire scares me. Sometimes I watch football and think: four chances is enough to get there. But we don’t have helmets. I want to say harder, I can take it, but there’s no proof I can.

The day my body caught fire the woodland darkened. The horizon was a sea of maids, rushing to piece me back into a girl. Out of the girl came yellow flowers, came stem & sepal. You never happened, they said. The meadow was a narration of lessness. Inside the corral, horses fell from the impact of lightning. They broke down. I heard gunshots in my sleep. I was a keeper of breath, of hay. I walked a field, collecting bones. You can build a house out of bones. You can stand at the doorway quarrelling with your legs to enter or run until you turn to ash.