The wind has blown my plaid away,
my heart too hoar to hear.
You mouthed my name the way a lure
calls merlins to appear.
Mine broke its breast against the pane
two months before the frost;
I knew a thing was on its way
and knew it would be lost.
I wished you, not in innocence,
but practice, slow and earned.
We train ourselves only to want
what cannot be returned.
You came as fae things always do,
too early, much too late —
a glow of sap and elf-light cast,
too green a bough to break.
“If you would have me, then,” you said,
“you’ll prove you can be taught.
I’ll set the labors. Finish them.
Fail and you’ll have me not.
Bring me a field with neither edge
nor owner nor design.
Bring me a ballad breathing still
after you break the line.
Bring me a question asked so close
its asking stains the air.
Bring me a wanting you can hold
without a hand laid there.”
I moved the board between us, said,
“Then hearken carefully:
I’ll do your work if you do mine
with like fidelity.
You’ll teach me youth without the lie
that power makes it pure.
You’ll want me knowing every rule
that says you must endure.
You’ll reckon with yourself by day
and stay when dusk begins.
You’ll finish what you start with me
and never call it sin.”
Your eyes agreed. Your body did
what bodies like yours do:
it learned the exits, memorized
the ways to vanish through.
I did your work. I brought the field
where nothing could take root.
I wrote the ballad, broke its line,
and still it panted, mute.
I asked the question near enough
to feel it whisper back.
I held the wanting like a blade
pressed flat against my back.
When next I came to keep our tryst,
the room had lost your shape;
a rhyme scratched on the borrowed chair,
a lesson in escape.
All season at the tower’s foot
they left my bird to lie.
I marked it daily coming loose –
quill, down, and amber eye.
Then, late, up from the hollow chest
a chequered wing did rise
and wore its inch of borrowed plaid
and flew to otherwise.
The wind has blown my plaid away.
The hawk long decomposed
still cries in tasks I can’t refuse
nor teach myself to close.
