STARVING AND MOON-SOAKED

You knew something was wrong when the wedding invitation never arrived,
but you didn’t ask when you called, just told me
you were buying my bus ticket to the town up north you retired to
after your third wife—who’d always bemoaned your propensity
to agglomerate old trucks that needed too much fixing, who hated
that you still talked to wives one and two on special occasions—left you
one night when you were elbow deep in oil, cinched up to the belly
of a 1972 Ford in the underground parking garage at your condo.
The coffee you made when we got in from the depot burned at the bottom of the pot,
but you poured two cups anyway, then dragged me outside—
the smell of breakfast’s tangerine marmalade and pumpernickel still on your fingers—
to the yard behind the farmhouse. You liked pretending
my dad grew up there, that you and his mother raised him half wild shooting
red foxes in the early morning, because you thought that’s what men like you did,
but really he’s just a city kid like me. You needed my help
checking the steel traps you set around the chicken coops to catch whatever
was killing the hens at night—I bruised up my hands prying open
the snapped-shut jaws. Caught by the neck was the limp body
of a weasel, which you seized tail first and corrected me when I called it that.
It was actually a sable, you explained, the shell from a chicken’s egg
still hooked by one jagged edge to its tooth. It’s important to get some things right.
And in the shed at the end of the driveway you sat me down on a stool
you carved the summer you took up carpentry—your collection of hacksaws on the wall
quadruple what it was the last time I saw you—and I felt myself tip to one side.
You laid out the sable on your work bench, belly up. And though you were never one
for platitudes or hypocorism—I think the exact phrase my dad used for you was
emotionally fucked—there you were talking sweetly while you skinned the thing,
the zip of your knife down its soft belly. There was nothing milquetoast about a sable,
you told me, their slenderness notwithstanding; they ripped up your
screaming hens in seconds, starving and moon-soaked. I didn’t want to think
what you’d do with it now, but I liked knowing you understood how
to be careful with something. And not in the way you’d refuse until I went home
to ask me why I’d called it off or how my dad was doing these days, but
with the tenderness we reserve for when we’ve left something dead,
and all we want is to be forgiven.