CECILY PARKS
Beast-Lover Variations
1.
Always watering burdock and thistle,
bundling butter-and-eggs bouquets,
I missed the immaculate
angle of his approach. A cleverer girl
would have stayed home, tended to what
encroached, but his turning
unlatched me. I followed,
browsing on buffalo, goose and bearberries,
plucked pears from a vine. He touched
none, thorns never took to his thighs,
and we differed in other strains
I began to forget. I've filled rivers
with salmon, he said, tapped sweet
cactus juice, I have some tricks
to teach you—one with a hare, one with
a vole,
one with a waning moon. My basket
thumping muzzle, dewclaw like a hunted
pulse against my hip, I was lapsing
into love. As many doorways
loomed as aspen pairs and I recalled
that I was not brave, not ever, and stopped
to sleep. My paths were meant to purl
gently downhill, spider webs brocade the brush,
fate be tractable. A cleverer girl
2.
would not have placed an even
number of huckleberries in every cobbler,
nor upended equal parts of nettles
and sage above her bed. But
I was wising up, and waking
by a stream I could name, I did not try to pick
my way home. I swam, my gullet
ice-plugged in the instant. Having pinned
aprons to a winter line, strung
barbed-wire fence, palmed the paw-sized
disc of snow inside a lynx track, I had mastered
cold work; I thought I could leave
anyone. Underwater was otherwise—
a granite thicket and billowing silt,
caddisfly cases and cut-banks,
a numbness that may have been him
coursing over me. No matter
how dearly I willed my floodgates
shut, I took on water like a buckshot
dory, a hungry bucket, a jam jar waiting
for weed blooms in a waiting house
like mine—I could only tumble
downstream with him who fed me
dozens of wings. A cleverer girl
3.
would not have mooned over
so many fine-lined maps, nor relished the heft
of atlases—knowing the planned-for lists
toward rupture before rapture,
she would have foreseen remorse
even in a town called Fishtail.
In the elephant-head meadow, I still
had my basket, brimming now with the most
bulbous of black ants, flax-pods and fat
crackling grasshoppers. My feeder's figure
turned black-and-white-winged
cartwheels and oh was I weary of change—
saying magpie, I said as much, inviting
him home. If I coveted age, I coveted a body
mooring mine to whichever eave
was ours—who he would be then
fretted me less than dwelling there. As far
as the cleverer girl, I ditched her, but saying
I was wary no longer would make
me a liar. An odd-berried cobbler
in the oven, I waited for faucets to spout
gravel, walls to fall and my traveled
basket to unravel as we sat together
astounding the eyes of my maple table. 
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