He carved faces into the dead parts of cedars.
He wore a belt of chisels around his waist.
To determine where they were dead,
he took a leafless limb, followed it like thread
back to its spool, down the corresponding strip of trunk.
In the middle of those woods, where the ground
sloped into a large bowl, mist often got trapped,
parted at our calves. We walked together for a long time,
and as we walked, he traced what I said
back to my left breast, down to the tender hole
where I was once attached to my mother
until I went silent. Then, he braced my back
against a tree. He took out a chisel and kneeled.
You ask when I stopped shouting everything
and started keeping language close to my mouth
as if I were reading to a match that had to last my life.
Well it was not that day. That was much later,
after the trees had all been cleared and the earth
leveled. When I stopped begging to be believed
and started telling the truth, no man was there.
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