Four summers back I saw myself breaking
my hand against a man’s face, interrupting
a word so certain and raw I would not listen,
and my fist named him a liar.

But I only watched, one eye keeping target,
the other dilating with drops from an approaching,
wounded future. The doctor is smiling now, or attempting to,
inspecting my battered knuckles and offering

me the same gentle fiction told by windows
about the distance between two points,
about my pacing here between the surgery
white of this hall and the blue of your room.

He locks my right fist in a cast, my left in fury.
Now the lies are told against my fingers gripping
the prescription, your name wrapped around
red milligrams. When I return home, I cannot open

the jar of rosemary, cannot slice an onion.
I wish my neighbor had occasion to make a pie
and needed to borrow a cup of sugar or an egg.
She would ask me about you, about when you might return.

Then maybe my hand would open when I try to explain
that you are the last daughter of the North wind.
When you were born, her tresses had silvered
with long years, but she was young enough for a final lover.

When he left, she named you with the breath of tempest—
the snap of line and sail, the buffeting of ships at sea.
You give the oak a song, whisper a notion to Appalachian ears;
Sutter’s Mill, California, also deserves the weight of their feet.

Whether I drive home or away, it is your hair,
smooth and cold, that curls through my fingers
with my arm out the window. West, the dimming
coal of sun smelts the clouds tumbling, tumbling gold.