My Husband, Lost in the Wild

He said he buried his right eye in South Georgia — on a dare, he said, when he was little, beneath one green ash of two that mark the end of a road whose name he’s by now forgotten:Lonesome something, maybe Dog or Cricket. He said he couldn’t love me, not really, not without his old right eye, and anyway he’d left his tongue as a tip slid under a mug at a small North Florida diner, would collect it too along the way, seeing as he’d asked the server to save it, and she had kindly agreed. Three of his ribs were further gone — one in Wisconsin, where he’d planted it like a tree though he believed even then nothing would bloom on it. Another he pawned in Manitoba for a silver bracelet, which he wore only when he was very sad, and his last rib he’d been keeping in a safe deposit box in a credit union on the alien Oregon coast where he’d visit sometimes, stopping often at vantages to take in expanses of pines covered in moss and something else, like brine, and the pines were tall, tall and uncommunicating, as if they had been designed only to listen. His ears he’d left with me, I told them everything — words I had invented for the color of new moons, city names I had given to four slender ant colonies that had since emerged on the lawn. I told the ears Come back to me, but they were unable to relay these types of things, and anyway there was nothing else to do. I took all my littlest veins and pitched them as a woven tightrope out of the kitchen window and hooked, with a makeshift grapple, the cheek of the visible moon, which carried me away, and I was sorry to have wounded it like that and I was sorry to be carried by what I had wounded.