Sunday morning, the lumberyard quiet. Robins are back. What they whistle is rage, shame. Ice on puddles forms struts and lattices, transparent chambers that don’t last a day. It’s too cold for the rich, sweet wood smell. Crosscut logs, long bodies, wait for the saw. Oak, fir, pine, hemlock. I’m crooked timber with fleshy rootknots, dark galls, cut, stacked to dry, same sizes bound together, thick slices of sawed flesh. Birds shrill, claiming, reclaiming. The river carries its freight of ice. Under the water, a world of stones. Some of the ice forms shining swords.

I opened a cardboard box of letters. In the box, red and blue poison-dart frogs, folding guthook hunting knives, lumber crowbarred from the side of our house. You should have burned them. A hair grew from your thigh, dark filament, looped out into the neighborhood, wrapped around branches and strangled some rabbits. I climbed our roof with a pole to knock down a mango. Because of lesions in my soft, wet tissues, I could eat only mashed potatoes. Your car gunned its engine, slid itself out the driveway and took the blue bridge to Manhattan. Our best friend tried to kill himself. Women wrote to say they desired you. Love was a botched experiment. I scooped out the ripe fruit of the mango and looked at the hairy stone. Mangos cure every disorder, even a strangled, runover heart.

People drive urgently like shamans moving relics to new shrines. When traffic grinds down to nothing, I take a night journey, darkness contagious as guilt, drunk on a single star, processions of shadows obstructing the highway. The gods request that I stop describing them. So I won’t mention the rabbit with the face of a man, accusing finger, long gown of funerary fabrics, necklace of flaming tires. At the cold river, I ask an eider to guide me over the water, beg it to cure my habit of sadness.