The Mentor

He carved faces into the dead parts of cedars.

He wore a belt of chisels around his waist.

To determine where they were dead,

he took a leafless limb, followed it like thread

back to its spool, down the corresponding strip of trunk.

In the middle of those woods, where the ground

sloped into a large bowl, mist often got trapped,

parted at our calves. We walked together for a long time,

and as we walked, he traced what I said

back to my left breast, down to the tender hole

where I was once attached to my mother

until I went silent. Then, he braced my back

against a tree. He took out a chisel and kneeled.

You ask when I stopped shouting everything

and started keeping language close to my mouth

as if  I were reading to a match that had to last my life.

Well it was not that day. That was much later,

after the trees had all been cleared and the earth

leveled. When I stopped begging to be believed

and started telling the truth—no man was there.