Defense

There is no wi-fi. The phone buoys one bar across the treetops, I do not bring the laptops out of their bags for two days. Bury myself in typewritten sheets of poetry. To write again after a hiatus, they say, is an exercise in faith. I write new poems, hopeful strings of words lost in the woods. Intermittently, the old boom box finds a scratchy country station. It speaks of community colleges, fireworks outlets, repeats melodies of carefree summers and heartbreak in local dive bars. You wonder if country singers live with their head in the clouds, or if New Yorkers live with theirs in the ground. 

In the book you read, a young girl drowns just off a Red Hook pier. 

You carry on swimming in the forest pond and there's a word for this kind of water in your home language that can never be translated. The word contains the likeliness that there is no bottom, that woodland spirits may drag you under, that the silence of a forest is a warning cry and you dive in anyway. When you married another tongue, you relinquished your unconditional faith in the magic of language, everything became open for investigation. Words became only words. 

You became determined to spend your life recapturing the intangible magic. Becoming the woodland creature come to take your readers' imagination away. You wonder if the witches they used to burn at the stakes weren't simply women who had discovered something beyond tragic gray doldrums of being some man's property. He writes to call you pretty and you think he doesn't know the half of what fire lies below. 

I stir a stick through the embers, wait for the last to die down before leaving the pit, mosquitoes delirious with warm flesh in the August twilight. 

It occurs to me I thought I was dying
when really I was only lost,
when really I had only tied myself to the stake
and refused to light a match.