We can only access what is real through the mediation of language,

but that doesn't mean if you stick a knife through your chest

you're not going to get hurt. What I mean: our bodies

get in the way of our souls all the time. It's not the words,

it's the gesture of them. Going through us like bullets

through trees. Not the little birds falling to the ground,

but their falling. Not their falling, but something in the stretch

they have to fall. When two people walk into an open field,

each holding a pistol, facing each other, walking backwards,

counting down, it's not each other they're shooting at,

but the distance between them. I would rip out my heart

to give to you but that's not what I'm trying to say.

What am I trying to say? When I was a kid

my dad punched my bedroom door and the tear in the paint

looked like a face. I wanted to be good, said the face.

I believe you, I said, I believe you, Dad, I do.

Every day when I was five

I asked my mother if it was my birthday,

and just when I began to believe I was

the only person who had never been born

I came downstairs to her holding

a single balloon in her hand. I do not remember

the color of it, or what her face looked like,

or what she had said if anything at all, but I remember

thinking that I knew something more about the world—

there had been a time before me, and then

I had, inadvertently, begun. And now a balloon,

made both invisible and permanent by memory

could mean everything, and descending those stairs

that opened onto a day uniquely my own, descending was still

an action like any other, and meant back then

an entrance into something open and full of light

like the kitchen of our old house in the morning, like

the front door, and not an unwilling return

into some dark and flooded basement

of the heart, my heart, which I believed

years later was my real home.

And when I lived there, by which I mean in the flood

I lay belly up, waiting for whoever it was

to be finished fucking me, I would feel humiliated

not by however my body was being used

but if, at the end, he would pay for my cab home;

home being loosely defined, in those days,

as a place away from men who I hoped,

being older, would be more dangerous

and maybe kill me or something and then I could leave

the world the same way I entered it: with all the mercy

of having no choice. Though in the end

all that age meant was that

they looked weary in lamplight and it almost seemed

I was offering them whatever little mercy

I had left in me instead. But please don't get me wrong.

It wasn't always like this: though I don't remember

what we talked about, ever, or how we came to meet,

a boy comes to mind, sometimes,

who drove me across the Verrazzano-Narrows

Bridge on accident, when we were trying to go

nowhere, not Staten Island,

and immediately turning back around

paid the toll twice, while I sat in the passenger's seat

and laughed until I cried, and though when I left him

that year, going home for the summer, I told all my friends

It's not like we're gonna get married, or anything,

I still told all of them, the story coming out of me

involuntarily, as though it could demand, somehow,

to be born. And even if, after I came back,

I didn't call him and we never spoke again,

I at least know why I didn't: because at that point

what had gone between us I could not afford

to ruin. Like when my mother once,

sometime between that boy

and my year of no birthdays,

when I knew something would soon go wrong

inside me and still wanted then to try

to fix it—suggested, outside the psychiatrist's office,

not looking at me, that we die,

right then, together. And I thought of how

every night when I was five

she would silently kneel in front of me

on the bathroom floor, brushing my teeth,

holding my mouth open, carefully, with one hand.

I had a boyfriend who once told me

it's more humane to shoot and eat deer,

showing me a video about the inevitability

of their prolonged starvation in the wild:

If I were a deer, he said—

I thought this only happened

in movies, but he was the first person I ever saw

pound the floor with his fists

when he sobbed, and begged me not to go.

My friend once told me

the story of the father of a friend who one day

went to Brazil on business forever

and not only that, but found it in him

to call his wife, and tell her so:

I've found a new woman; I'm never coming back

or something to that effect, as my friend relayed it

to me, and I remember wondering how else

it could have gone. What he could have done

differently. What he should have.

For some reason I'll never know, my mother

loved to tell anyone who would listen the story

of my piano teacher's wife, who one day

went for a hike alone

and had a stroke. Though she was healthy,

my mother would quickly clarify,

and it was not a question

of health, but a faulty vein inside of her

she never could have known. And though

my mother told it like a cautionary tale,

how could it have been, unless the moral of

the story was what Rilke said about how the end

grows inside of you like a fruit.

I used to think this was true. That people

wore their end on them, unknowable

as skin, and as visible, and then I sat on his couch

for the last time, the couch of that heroic

hunter of dying deer, and thought how

there was a beginning to this,

though I couldn't find it

and I would have to get off

that couch and go home one way

or another, and that staring at his hands

I could not imagine how.

After I walked through his door

for the last time, he left the city

and it was no longer his door. And did it start

when we met? In the car, when I was a child,

my mother would often cry in the driver's seat

and ask God why he had punished her

with me, and when I began

to cry, too, the first time it happened,

she turned and asked me what I was

crying for and I remember thinking earlier that day

we had laid on the kitchen floor

together, drawing pictures on butcher paper,

and I had messed up while drawing

our house and the more I tried

to fix it it only got worse

until eventually to keep me

from tears of frustration my mother took a red crayon

and drawing flames over it said look

now it's just a fire and as we sat there

on that couch I remembered

he did not only hunt deer, that boy,

he also loved watching birds, and would show me

videos of birds of prey moving in for the kill

in slow motion, making the osprey's sudden

plunge into water suddenly possible,

every beat of the wing, every drop of water

clarified to a moment of its own

and as he kept asking me what happened I thought

how I wanted the answer, too.