Practice

“so this is the world. / I’m not in it. / It is beautiful.”

— Mary Oliver, from “October”

my sister was a doe, a rose, and the wind.
dirt clung to our hooves, a way for the earth to say: 
you are the dirt clinging to you.

so our world was made.

we stepped on gooseberry skins
we spat out, ambled toward the river’s

wedding veil of foam. someday shirts
will hang from our antlers. someone will see

our bones, but also not see, the way one sees 
a house and does not imagine
the elements inside,

the milk congealing with neglect,
the rust on the underbelly of a bathtub.

do not forget the burdock, the dark greens,
I said to sister, as we lowered 
into the river.

sister, how we disappear,
though it is not miserable, for the things
we’ll become, cloud, stone, poem, are not miserable.

do not forget my voice, I told her,
moving past the roots of yellow water lilies, 
the waterlogged crane singing.

then, we did not move. in the river
the signs of our being were silenced, washed out.

then, the doe consumed the rose, the wind 
consumed the doe, and we saw the world

as it was—beautiful, and we no longer in it.

Read more from Issue 18.1.