Keetje Kuipers--"Across a Great Wilderness without You

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Across a Great Wilderness without You
by Keetje Kuipers
The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them—                                                   language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the platinum thread beyond them where the river runs the length of the valley. That's where the fish are.                                    Tomorrow I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled stone beneath the bank, their bodies desperately alive when I hold them in my hands, the way prayers become more hopeless when uttered aloud.                             The phone's disconnected. Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you: I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm over my bed. It's the sound of them shouldering against each other that terrifies me, as if it might hurt to brush across another being's living flesh.                 But I carry a gun now. I've cut down a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town— my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools I've retired from their life of touching you.