My Husband, Lost in the Wild

He said he buried

his right eye in South Georgia — 

on a dare, he said,

when he was little, beneath

one green ash of two

that mark the end of a road

whose name he’s

by now forgotten: Lonesome

something, maybe Dog

or Cricket. He said

he couldn’t love me, not

really, not without

his old right eye,

and anyway he’d left

his tongue as a tip

slid under a mug

at a small North Florida diner,

would collect it too

along the way, seeing

as he’d asked the server

to save it, and she had kindly

agreed. Three of his ribs

were further gone — one in Wisconsin,

where he’d planted it like a tree

though he believed even then

nothing would bloom on it.

Another he pawned in Manitoba

for a silver bracelet,

which he wore only

when he was very sad,

and his last rib

he’d been keeping

in a safe deposit box

in a credit union

on the alien Oregon coast

where he’d visit sometimes,

stopping often at vantages

to take in expanses of pines

covered in moss

and something else, like brine,

and the pines were tall,

tall and uncommunicating,

as if they had been designed

only to listen. His ears

he’d left with me,

I told them

everything — words

I had invented for the color

of new moons, city names

I had given to four slender

ant colonies that had since

emerged on the lawn.

I told the ears Come back to me,

but they were unable to

relay these types of things,

and anyway there was nothing

else to do. I took all

my littlest veins

and pitched them

as a woven tightrope

out of the kitchen window

and hooked, with

a makeshift grapple, the cheek

of the visible moon, which

carried me away, and I was sorry

to have wounded it like that

and I was sorry to be carried

by what I had wounded.