The Pecan Tree
i.
To begin with, I cannot begin. Everything insists on patience. Everything is patience. Patience. Am I virtuous, yet. Am I my Self a virtue, yet. Could you say, “You have cultivated such a shape of patience, I could nearly give it a female name. Something like a friend I used to know.” Could you say that to your woman and keep a straight face.
There was a bird’s nest in the pecan tree. The little boys from the blue house on the corner, six and ten, threw stones until it fell and the eggs smashed on the earth, stained it yolk for the moment of a few hours, then dried into a sheen. We didn’t scold them. They were not our children to scold.
This is not my room. I did not fuck you in my bed. I do not know what birds those eggs held. I did not taste the meat of those nuts. I did not crack those shells with my teeth.
ii.
I picked up the fragments of the egg shells and mailed them to Anna. I had meant to send her my hair last Solstice, when I cut it all off because my madness had concluded. Instead I kept the locks in a paper bag for nine months. I even moved them with me to a new house. When it was time for the third move, I threw them away in the dumpster. That’s bad Voodoo.
Later, the landlord came and sawed down the pecan tree. He didn’t haul it off but left it prostrate in the front yard. A corpse of paper. The little boys shot at it with their cap guns. The flies even settled on the bark. Knowing what they know.
iii.
I like the shape of your woman. I like the shape of your woman on a horse, and across the upswung seat of a seesaw, and spread like an ink stain across Mexican sheets. But mostly I like the shape of her on the corpse of my pecan tree. She is a patient woman. She understands animals and what animals desire. She understood why the birds returned to the fallen tree. We tried not to judge how long she sat beside those sad sad birds, coaxing. We tried to act natural.
When I say patience I mean I can’t stand it. When I say patience I mean: burn that lock of hair I gave you. Do no harm. Do no harm; to me, to me.
