I’ve only worn it twice. Mostly I am not the type;
not elegant, not femme, not especially old-fashioned anymore,
and partly where we live there are no places
where fur is de rigueur. Both times I wore it I was overdressed
both for the weather and for the company.

But it was hers. Wearing it made me feel like I
was carrying part of her someone could see,
not just her gesture or her recipes, but something
tangible and rich and soft and real.

He took the book from my hands and put it
on the highest shelf;
just as I was about to learn what the lions would do
to the parents, he lifted the story away from me,
pushed it back out of sight, told me it wasn’t for me,
but I knew.

I knew where he’d put it, knew how to push
a kitchen chair against the wall, knew
how to wait, but most of all I knew

Some things you are not given or allowed.
Some things are yours by right
(the velt, the sun, the scream, the dead
and endless grass beneath the sky)

His brow furrows as he lifts the spoon, sips,
rolls the broth around in his mouth.
He knows sweet and salty and sour and we are working on umami,
and he will accept enough spicy to make a dish worth eating.
“Try salt.” He says, handing me the spoon.

I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a secret:
every day with him I am doing the same thing
we are doing at the stove —
checking, adjusting, adjusting until
it feels right, resting easy with us both.

Like this, now. I am trying to teach him
something nobody taught me: how
to tell what is missing, how to name the lack,
how to fill ourselves with something good.

My favorite thing about her was the way she wagged
not just her tail, but everything from the front legs back.
It took less than nothing to make her so happy
she would fling herself into motion;
the back of her body would flail from side to side
with so much power she would begin to spin,
yipping and prancing, like a cyclone of delight.
She could not be still. It wasn’t in her,
she had too much to wag for, she was full
of a joy so buoyant she made everyone around her float.

Eighty thousand winters he has lasted,
bowed beneath snow, shuddering in the wind,
through eighty thousand summers he has swallowed sunlight,
spread his limbs, raised his crown, and persisted.
He was ancient already when our human tongues
first shaped the name of tree;
before the first plow, he was breaking ground
and delving after water, spreading by repetition.

Stand here and you stand in the heart of time itself made golden,
cupped in the palm of a hand with forty thousand fingers,
touched by the whisper of voices, the shiver of something
both god and cathedral.

Years later he will say he never meant to leave,
will say he only meant to clear his head, will say
he was afraid he’d do something he’d regret if he stayed.
Maybe these things will even be true;
maybe the girl will forgive him,
maybe the boy will barely remember
what it was for him to be here at all.

I buried it because I was seventeen, because I knew
you bury things you need to work their magic,
because I was leaving, and because I did not want to.

I wrote out the poem line by line (someone else’s,
although I wrote my own by then, mine
did not feel powerful or right yet; not until years
after that would I find my voice, would feel I’d made
something powerful enough to bury).

I wrapped it around a dime, the only silver I could get,
and a hawk feather I knew by then I wasn’t meant to have.
I said words over it that I have since forgotten.

I don’t know now what magic I was hoping I would work, but I know this:
I left, although I didn’t want to, and
against all odds I stayed away.

And that is magic, that
is a spell that worked, if any ever has.

My cousins hung the swing long before my birth,
and it stayed in that same cottonwood until
I was old enough to be warned off using it.
The chain was rusted, branch rotted, the water beneath
thick with silt; the rubber left dark smudges on your hands,
made grainy by a dozen years of sun.

But we would swing anyway, clambering out
onto the bank, stretching to reach the chain,
whooping and shrieking into the air above the ditch.
I wouldn’t do it now; but I was twelve,
and invincible like only twelve can be.

Those first months I carried him wherever I could,
bundled against my body, close to my heart.
I could not bear to be parted from him,
nor he from me. We were too much part of one another then,
and the world, which before had always seemed
to fit me well, with him in it was suddenly
far too vast for anyone to walk in it alone.

I wish that someone had told me when I was younger that
it’s something you can grow into. Not out of,
which implies you leave it behind: that I heard constantly.
Butterfly chrysalis and coach made of pumpkin:
the world is designed around telling awkward young girls they will change,
become beautiful, become loveable, become slender and fine and quiet.
I wish one story would have told the truth:
you will grow wild and stout and prickly,
you will never feel right in pumps, glass or otherwise.
You will always be loud at the wrong times and quiet too often and you will run
wild as pumpkin vine. You will find space, and failing to find it
you will take it and make it yours, until it fits
the shape you never need learn how to change.