LOVE PRODIGAL I make love when I am bored. That's how I know I'm an intelligent animal. It's easy to tremble--a pistil brushed with a bumblebee's fur-- and who doesn't want to be golden, like pearls of fat glistening in an artery or a mother's first milk? I want to send you photos of dead fledglings on the sidewalk, those perils of the lavish season, but we are wrong, a news story tells me so, explaining beauty drives evolution, not a mate with an advantageous beak. I wish I could tell you this. Letters and novels keep seducing me with their fantasies of closure, but I like the way your silence wastes inside me. I am a grieving animal. Let's not pretend souls are beautiful. They're as ugly as white petals wilting, crisping and curling in on themselves in cloudy water and green-rot. But let them fall into me like loose change in a leg cast. What's broken cannot be healed with anything but superglue and imagination, but let it be tended to. Let it be tender. Let's imagine a miracle together at a distance, the reunion of a pronoun and its first verb. I'm not over it--the elk's blood blackens the bottom of the fridge, and when I wipe it, it leaves a pink quarter, blood-ghost, hunger stain in the shape of your birthmark. I'm a regretful animal. My heart tries to grow as fast as velvet in May. It's trying to attract an ending with a crown of daisies, an archive of spring, of wants, of waterfalls, of woods, good God, I know you won't take me back. from DIARY OF FIRES: A PROSE CROWN OF SONNETS SMOKE FORGES DUSK, ASH PLAGIARIZES SNOW. THE FIRST THREAT TO MEMORY IS THE TRUTH. I'm afraid I love like my mother, who told me on a heat-drunk walk that if I ever thought anything bad about her she would kill herself. So I ran, the word daughter around my neck like a collar. In one of the oldest origin stories of the phoenix, the bird made its resurrection fire from myrrh and its parent. The myrrh that burns was also the phoenix's cradle. I try and sing my mother's favorite hymns, and my lungs go flat as a catfish skull, my heart knows its own color, the pink so hot it stains my hands like beets. A cosmic mauve perfumes the hellebores--my ribs ache with her voice. My love and I talk about what we would do when one of us dies as I cut his hair, and he says, At first I thought I couldn't live without you --I pause, take the guard off the razor-- but then I realized I'd be sad for a long time, and then I'd be fine . I brush bristled hair from his collar bones and cry; I've never felt this safe. It's the phoenix's loneliness I try to understand the most, how the myth promises renewal, rebirth, but to live forever is to live alone. Fire doesn't even offer even the company of a shadow. Before medical astrology lost its influence, people believed that to become a good physician you must first be a good astronomer. My mother's blood slinks in me, a hibernating secret, but some people see it and diagnose me as a fire sign. Recovering the exiled memory of her mother trying to die in front of her, the character Meredith Grey cries, fictional but grieving better than me on a TV show. Only once?! I think, suck it up, and before the darkness reveals itself, I sear the wound closed. Excerpted from Love Prodigal by Traci Brimhall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
