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.