All of This, in Two Days

It’s dark here, in the morning, when my hands first exchange my body’s currency for the earth’s. I bleed among the brambles as I tear them out, heart by heart. But it’s good. It’s good. It’s not my blood anyways. I hold it for a time, wash myself clean from the inside, and I will until the earth demands I give it back and I disintegrate, decompose, die a molecular death and give the body, never mine, back. My forearms ache from cutting back the oak, preparing for the harvest. Not my first and certainly not my last. I hope, at least. I hope.

Sleep can’t evade me here, and it’s good. It’s great. I dream of planes turning in ninety degree angles, not left, not right, not up, but down, falling head first out of the sky. I’m there, in the plane, calling my loved ones and saying goodbye. I’m on the ground, watching it happen, calling my loved ones and hoping they pick up, say hello, I’m safe, I’m miles away from the impact zone, from the nebulous body that formed in the space the plane no longer wanted. It’s purple and blue and gold pierces through, calls the dead into the next, final plane. I’m miles away from the curtain of fire and falling smoke.

I write letters here, letters I don’t intend to send but do intend to read to you, someday, should you find me among the grapes and figs. They’re perfect. I’m perfect. The world has its hands all over me, its skin on mine, its breath in my lungs, its dust, its dust, its dust in my mouth and lungs and ears and eyes. My nose bleeds because of it, and I let it pour. Often I write about blood, I’m not sure why. I write letters to tell you about it, about the drainage, the clarifying drainage that I welcome, for it replaces the April days when I once writhed. I wield the scythe and kill, kill, kill. I plan to write you a letter about that too, someday.

The dogs are elegant here, and I love them. They’re good. They live with the sheep and we feed them organ meats because that’s what they want. They want it, so we give it to them.

My hands harden here, and I become more real as I bear each blow. I love them. I love it. Hands that write, hands that wash, hands that lift the child high in the sky. He speaks in onomatopoeia. Mah. Mah. Tickticktick. He speaks in German, Italian, English, but to him they are all one language, the delineation nonexistent to his malleable mind. He hides, I seek. He seeks, I hide. He falls asleep on my chest as I lay face up in the grass. He breathes out, I breathe in. I breathe out, he breathes in. We eat figs. His are full of ants, and he cries as they discover his mouth, his tongue. Wah, wah. Water to wash them down. They discover his stomach, the inside, so I rub the bug spray into his skin, the skin of his belly, and then they no longer bother him. He feels he is protected, and he is—by the saints and the sky. He sees God in the vaulting blue. The clouds that beetle, the rain that refuses to fall. The promise of it. I see God there too, more and more each morning, and I no longer dread the sun bleeding in through my blinds. I lack blinds and shutters and thick walls that could maybe, if I had them, absorb the boy’s cries. Wah, wah. In the beginning I would wipe the drool away from his chest, but now I let it fall. I let him put his fingers in my mouth and I let him jump all over me because he’s too small yet to sense the world’s boundaries. Age’s boundaries. I love him more with each hour, each second. We kick the ball off the cliff, it runs away into the olive grove so we climb down and pick the figs as we pass. Ants, ants. Ants on my arms and up into my ear and in his mouth and down into his stomach. He reaches up to me, says up, up, up. Andiamo. We run laps, circles around the kitchen, around the stove that presides from the center as the knives fall through the bread and hands knead and rest the dough. Nobody tells us to stop, so we don’t. I laugh with him and I forget the world. This kid and I. He notices that we both wear stripes and tears his shirt off and runs naked, stands on his chair at the dinner table and eats his cucumbers naked. Drenched in oil, bathed in mint, topped off with salt. He notices that we share our hair color, and he drapes mine over his head and then we share the hair itself. He can have it. I want him to have it. It’s his. We share it, but it’s his.

All of this, in two days.

I miss you here, but I missed myself much more and so I had to leave. I hide, I seek. And it’s good. It’s good.