First day. My father tracking one axis

deer. Tomorrow morning a fallow.

Come evening I’ll make fire and char the

meat for eating. My hands are good

at that now. Turning one thing to another.

I want to describe how once

this was the only place I could be what

I was but today what I want is to

go wherever my daughter is, in the years now

when the sun freckles her arms and dirt

cakes her fingernails. But that’s a feeling

I don’t have nouns for. I was the same age

when I watched my father take an axe to

the fox with a paw in the foot trap. The sound

that left it frightening rabbits from their warrens.