1. I thought I’d be pulling thick mats of wapato from my backyard bog, but there were no rhizomes, few bulbs. What clung to the digging fork’s tines—rotting burlap sacks I’d forgotten, jute now sodden, snake-like. (On the other side of the world, stone-faced Medusa and her snakes rest underwater in the Basilica Cistern.)
2. The shudder, as tendrils of eelgrass wrap around my ankles. It’s the touch of something I cannot see, something benthic by me, that makes me pull away. (Coney Island, when I was six. Sharp sand scoured abrasions on my feet, and when I ran to meet the gray-green foam at the swash-edge, the salt burned.)
3. (There is a place where time dilates, the way a cat’s eyes do when its gaze is suddenly fixed on a moth. There is a place where time cleaves into all its aggregate parts, sedimentary, granular. There is a place where “when” and “then” and “now” drain of all meaning, the way a vortex drains a too-full lake.)
4. The skull spider, above my bed, is hunting. Legs thinner than an eyelash, longer than my index finger, a slow herky-jerky measure across the ceiling. Does it see me? I can’t say, but discuss with myself whether or not to kill it. Whether or not it will scuttle down the wall, tangle in my hair. (I leave it, dream I'm grafting trees.)
5. Asked, and answered, with tenderness. What is it I wanted? To be brave enough to be weak, have the courage of a field mouse as it waits, so still, hoping the sparrowhawk will miss. To ask for what I wanted. First to ask myself (and hope not to break upon the question), then you. Drowning in fear; kissed back to breath.
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