Friday, December 10
DRIVING TO SANTA FE Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye a startle in black: swift green glance raking mine. A full second we held each other, then gone. Gone. And how did I know what to call it? Lynx, the only possible reply though I'd never seen one. The car filling with it: moonlight, piñon: a cat's acrid smell of terror. How quickly the gray body fled, swerving to avoid my light. And how often the sight returns to me, shames me to know how much more this fragment matters. More than the broad back of a man I loved. More than the image of my friend, cancer-struck, curled by the toilet. More than my regret for the child I did not have which I thought once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs stirring the dark. And if I keep these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? A flight, a thunder. A shield of light dropped before the eyes, pinned inside that magnificent skull only time would release. Split back, fade and reveal. Wind would open him. Sun would turn him commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage of shredded tendon, wasp-nest fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, gone. Even now, I thumb that face like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived, I lived in him, fishing the cold trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying when he died, which is a comfort. I must say this. Otherwise, I myself do not exist. It looked at me a moment. A flash of green, of gold and white. Then the dark came down again between us. Once, I was afraid of being changed. Now that is done. The lynx has me in its eye. I am already diminished. (Paisley Rekdal)