pecan

haven't written a poem in a month. tried being one instead. sipped forgiveness with my coffee each morning. used honey on the days when the forgiveness ran out. met a man who's a woodworker. let us be a little messy. marveled at the way he can move a feeling through his body without having to ask its name. made a game of it. watched each feeling slither upwards from its knot. when it reached his mouth, he'd part his lips, and i would put my fingertips to them just at the precipice before his breath. tried to catch the feeling and tell its business by exactly the way his laugh spliced through. one day, he splayed planks of various woods around me in his sawdusted shop. taught me to identify species. white oak, cherry, yellow pine, hickory, black loctus. i asked for the trick. how—in life—can you tell what is what? he started to talk about density, then stopped. said, you just know what it is because you know what it is. when he picked up the plank of pecan and held it up for me in the light, i knew exactly what he meant. i practiced apologizing and being said sorry to. the key to both is grace. more than once, i said out loud that honesty is my favorite flavor. just tastes good in the mouth. followed honesty like it was my water. followed friction like it was the sand that would lead me to it. burned a bridge. let it feel good. fumbled on the exit, though. looked back twice. decided that i more than want people—i need people. let that settle into a place where my body wasn't likely to forget it. decided to stop expecting the world to see things the way i see them. decided it was unfair and probably missing the point. decided to swap blame for curiosity. then followed the people who make me curious, make me want to know things. followed the people who heal me without needing to be anything different than exactly who they are. followed those people like my life depends on it. decided that my life depends on it. on the mornings when i woke up feeling desperate to be claimed, i walked outside and let the earth claim me. remembered some things. remembered that the truth of it is that the land is the commons. remembered that the ownership of it is a lie and that sometimes lies can be fastened and bolted so tight that we can mistake their fixedness for the feeling of being secure. and then we watch them become another kind of truth. there's reality and then there's reality, the thin layer of asphalt and then the many layers of earth underneath. then i remembered the responsibility in remembering. that if the land always agrees to claim me, i must always agree to claim it back. decided that taking ownership means claiming none of it in order to claim the responsibility of all of it. decided to keep the unpopular opinion because it was making sense to the children. asked after a lot of stories. heard one about a woman who outlived two husbands then decided that the lip-lined and mascaraed face she'd been wearing all that time wasn't really all-the-way hers. she stopped wearing it and got a job with the army. i listened to that story and all-the-way heard it. studied my own face in the mirror and decided to like all of its parts. slipped some like into my morning coffee. didn't need as much forgiveness after that. related with everything i could. related with the spider in the corner of the bathtub and the leaf-moth and the soil and the lizard in my dream. i didn't relate with the things i couldn't. remembered grace. went back to higher quantities of forgiveness in my coffee. played. wrestled. did some things i thought i couldn't and showed my body that we survived. found some limits of the self and decided to fall in love with them. decided that romance is so critical that i wondered how to even all-the-way heal without it. thought a lot about romance and asked after it. i don't mean romance in the february sense. i mean romance in the sense of creating a room so big that it can fit a million feelings inside of it and still have enough space to flip over each one on its back. spent some time on my back, personifying the sky. cried at the finished sight of a table that the woodworker made. but didn't cry too long or think too hard on it. swung on a swing. listened to a child tell a ghost story. listened to a mother tell a labor story. listened to a poet tell a digging story. told a digging story myself. then decided to stop digging. let a hole be a hole and walked away. decided how badly i want to be well and then made one. went back to the hole and filled it with water. drank. scooped. touched. wanted. needed. asked. answered. discerned. decided to be like pecan. how—in life—can you tell what is what? because, like a poem, a thing just is what it is.