You follow me through the winter. The lake is already frozen
unconscious. When we walk the woods to gather kindling
you will not even touch my shoulder,
so exquisite is my form of grief, as if your hand would graze
away my skin. After dark, I walk out across the lake
to feel the sky inhale.
I am cervine, a diamond smear, a single moment
of light gliding through fire-black trees,
as through a hole in time,
until one night
I fall through the ice, and you find me in the grass afterward,
panting and kicking, my neck not fair but stained with mud
and blood from the jaws of that animal, and there it is written
in scar and sweat, in biting flies:
Though I seem tame, I am wild to hold, so hold—