What Follows Is a Reconstruction Based on the Best Available Evidence

Let me tell you, dearest beloved, in the only way I ever could—

___

This failure of tongue: the bloom of  hunger when morning becomes the skin—

___

You walk to a mirror & never see yourself—

___

Have you ached for the world? You stare back into me until I exist—

___

again as a face filled with the swollen quiet of a sky locked in another decade—

___

& I’ve opened every window you shattered here with the hush of a mother

    who named you—

___

after nameless meadow, I hear tekín’me c’íxc’ix  clearing away the remains of

    a summer’s harvest—

___

a life: the fruiting shadow of a bitterroot seared to earth by your god mouthing

    líw líw—

___

-’ce: the history of our bodies is proven wrong in the flicker of an eyelid—

___

Holding steady, my fingerprints stain like cracks—

___

like the briefest coffins opening their lids, revealing only—

___

eyes that want nothing but the day-

___

light now rimming around each shut door in the house—

___

But here’s the poem again, my beloved: the poem will end, I promise, & life

    will—

___

go back to how it always was: before you—

___

ever looked in the mirror & forgot me breathing behind its melting tile of

    winter—

___

Look. The kitchen table is ready for you—

___

Your son is in position—

___

to smile as wide as the tire swing he lifts his legs up from to gather & thrust

    to the air—

___

She leaps into the amber of an afternoon gashed with breathing holes—

___

What, Lord, am I doing bearing the back of a mirror no one asked for?

___

Tell me anything, like—

___

hitxlic’áasa ’ee & these scraps of flame are landing on you, scattering over—

___

you, exploding—

___

Is this the sound of failure, the very beginning, or the faintest celebration

    of  forever?

___

Say láatis. pipísnim c’íxc’ix. Say yoqóx like a distant spring in another

    version of this nation. Listen—

___

Hear my fingerprints dissolve—

___

into the unspeakable names of animals stampeding until—

___

they vanish, until they are looking for you—

___

God, I promised this poem would end—

___

God, I’m only human enough to swallow what your season must offer—

___

You walk toward me, the entrance wound between us still fresh as a welcome—

___

but I am no longer there.