When I was young, very young, sometimes on road trips with my family, I would play a wordless game with my mother. We would hold hands, and as we held hands I would squeeze in a rhythm, one pulse followed by two beats of silence; then she would repeat it back to me, squeezing my hand in hers, then I would try two pulses, followed by one beat of silence, then one pulse; and she would repeat it back; then, I would let the rhythm grow to three, four, five, with pulses and beats of silence In between, and all the possibilities that occurred in this space between us, mother and child, until somewhere along the line she, or one of us, hard to say, would lose the thread, and she would glance down at me in acknowledgement; and who’s to say I’m not still playing this game?

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In our first house we didn’t have hot water, so I would wait in the bathtub for my mother to heat water on the wood-burning stove and mix it with cold water and then pour it over me. Wordless, splashing caresses.

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There were other times we’d swing together in the rope swing that hung from a cottonwood tree in the front yard, and sing together ‘you are my sunshine, my only sunshine’, or ‘itsy bitsy spider went down the water spout’, and as cotton blossoms fell from the trees and the clouds parted, I’d seem to see the sun itself streaming to meet our faces as our voices intertwined in song and my legs dangled out over hers as she pushed off again, and one day I’d be asked to go out to the mailbox to get the mail and I’d hesitate because a car seemed to be driving just a bit too slowly down the road, and she’d tell me I was right to be cautious, that there were bad men out there.

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There in a clearing of the forest seen from a bridge cut off from its own time—a hunter humming a tune to himself when these might have been hunting grounds—yet you enter the naked eye of the woods alone.

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Sometimes, when I felt like it and was alone and everything permitted, I’d savor the sweet mud of the ditch I played in, up to my chest, that bordered our property and the neighbors’; often I’d come back soaked, half-naked, leaving a trail of muddy footprints in the grass, cold but not cold, because I’d waded down in the muck and splashed and grabbed handfuls of rotting leaves and soil and sticks and twigs, and I’d reach down, far down, thinking I might find a pebble or two to tumble, and once found a fossilized acorn, or what seemed then to have been that—what would it mean, now, not to be so certain of anything, to treat summer as air’s mystery enfolding your skin, your whole body blanketed in its wetted loft—but I can’t grasp it, I circle back to myself, the hardly-widened world—leave aside politics and give me the wingspread of a black dove again as distant gunshot rings out in the rutilant dusk.

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On sultry days my brother and I would climb the stairs to the A-frame shed that seemed to stand like a sentinel overlooking the backyard, we’d pick through remnants of bees, spiders, wasps, thoraxes desiccated by the sill where our grandparents would dry berries and crabapples and the smell of sawdust and cedar shavings filled the air—who could sit and sweat it out the longest, I would wonder, what would happen if we fell asleep here, and sometimes tried to whistle—it was magical that the mouth could carve air, a special power confided to my mother that in squinting the eyes I could bend the sun’s straight rays, that at my back there could blow such a wind as would never leave me—it was wonder-ful.

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If I went far enough, past the A-frame, past the hole in the fence where upon occasion the neighbor’s Dobermans would scramble through, past the pit where we’d burn bonfires, there was a kind of marsh where I once stepped on a nail sticking out of a wooden plank—right through my foot—no pain. From the marsh I plucked a pretty flower—the most beautiful flower I’d ever seen—to give it to my mother. I love you so much I ever smell you. It was a buttercup and she was heartbroken I’d taken its life. Here was something singular, and in one clumsy stooping pass I’d destroyed it. Were there adages, insights, anecdotes you might gather up in a sore clump to present to yourself while still breathing, or does it only come to the wrinkles earned and reinvested in your own death mask, evidences of human wilting, petals solidified in clay—but I don’t pretend to be able to read faces, and perhaps the swamp itself stunk of decay. All these struggles of growing older I seem to understand less and less the older I am—the necessities of the past begin to move alongside the present, breathe with the past in the way that even now you might in letting rest rest, breathe in the millionth parts of flowers impinging memories—creeds broken across the centuries as easily winnow to dust—when I did run back into my mother’s arms my brother chasing close behind, his hands wound with melted plastic he’d tried to burn me with, there it was—comfort, fleeting relief from one’s fellow tormenters, a warmth, an island of peace allowed no other visitors. It took weeks for him to recover from the burns, and even years later he’d be picking at scabs, for nothing really heals.

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Beyond the swamp that was no man’s land, the heart of summer opened into a field of wild wheat that bore my hairless shins along its scintillating husks, drooping crazily as the winds scattered in all directions and my knobby knees wobbled, and the song I sung to myself was heard if at all by the summer’s quickening heart, where, encompassing my field of vision though I stood hardly distinguishable from that field, at the center, a sprawling oak tree that seemed to reach down, inviting me to climb it, which we both knew was impossible—its branches strained under the weight of light casting innumerable shadows that mingled with my own and that wanted me to stay and rest as though this were a forever-time and not one small sharp boyhood-moment, that by the roughness of the bark, like my grandfather’s hands after he’d come from the shop, I might sense a glimmer of the continuity, the continual establishment of the kingdom of souls: souls in each finger, each nail bubbling its own risen moon, each groove and blight dug-out of souls, each oakleaf fallen to the acorn-laden ground a soul, even the encroaching dusk like perspective lines, like ledger consumed by the substances of abstraction—souls, then as effortlessly would I turn and sway and invent a dance and fall and 

know if not the luminous, then the brightest most joyous ramparts of solitude, that when I now seem to remember it, it doesn’t seem possible there being an I to remember it, that it is nonetheless a memory of a unity—a yearning forgetfulness rippling through the leaves near dusk, alternations of the same warmth and cold that later whomever I became would crudely name love and hate, as if I as a self separable from all else might pretend to understand emotion given its departure from that original unity—what caresses have I known that compare—whose lowering into the earth can compare?

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By the time we moved out of the first house and last house where we’d build pillow forts and watch my father's slideshows from college, I had grown up enough to realize some things should be said and others kept to oneself. Still, the night before we were to move out, I wrote in black marker all the facts I knew about myself, who I was, who my family were, in slanting ink down the wall as I wrote it sideways from the supine darkness of my bottom bunkbed. Who they were who would move in, why they might want to know these things, were questions that either did not occur to me, or whose answer must have seemed obvious, as the world often seems obvious to a child, if you let it.