You Might Wonder Why I Wandered So Deep

without a compass, without the skills, truth be told,
to use a compass once I’d gotten lost

having taken my grouchy self into the forest to ask
the spruce saplings and fireweed for the grace to forgive

my girlfriend for the things she’d done the previous winter—
grouchy meaning, in this case, pissed off and heartsore.

You might wonder how I went from murmuring
to the forest spirits to urgent open-throated bargaining

with god, to promising some deity
that if I got out of these woods alive I’d drop

the grudge against my girlfriend and her other lover.
You might wonder if the lateness

of the hour had something to do with it,
if the trickles of tiny streams, the quaking aspen,

the cheeky riot of wildflower and fern
start to lose their charm after three or four hours

of ever more desperate circling, of where the hell
was that goddamn path, the sharp scent of fear

in my sweat, soaked from the knees down, calves
and thighs studded with devil’s club thorns, the kind

you’re digging out of your flesh for weeks
afterwards—if you’ve planted trees in BC or Alberta

you know what I mean—and let’s remember
that I didn’t know if I had weeks afterward,

given how skinny I am and how cold the nights
are that late in the season, my main thought

by the sixth hour to just keep moving and stay
warm as I blundered into a hornet’s nest and ran

from the indignant swarm while the sunset
painted the sky every ominous shade of red

and coyotes howled, my own throat past hoarse
from hollering for someone, anyone to help me.

You might wonder if I kept my end of the deal
afterwards, if after two forest officers took the back roads

to my lookout and, having no idea where I’d gone
leaned on the truck horn until I followed that blessed

sound out of the dark toward the lit window of my cabin
and if, after my girlfriend drove five hours the next day

just to give me a back-rub and fry me a steak,
I was able to forgive her.

And when I think now of our breakup, years afterwards,
all I remember is the baby bird that had fallen from the nest

to sprawl, pink and pathetic on the neighbour’s driveway,
how I grabbed the shovel from where it leaned against

warm brick to sever the head from the scrawny body—
it took two tries—then rushed off, promising a decent

burial when I returned, how weakly it thrashed
when I lifted it hours later, how I had to drop it again

to smash the skull flat with the shovel. I think
of the mess that a partial decapitation makes

when good intentions are the opposite of mercy, I think
of wracking sobs, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do that

as I buried it alone on my knees in the dark in the backyard
wishing it could have been a briefer dying.

You might wonder why I’m circling back
to any of this, why I still can’t pry it out of my flesh

having forgiven things worse than that winter, or why
I thought god would decide to save someone from hypothermia

or not, based on whether she forgave
her girlfriend. Why this seemed the best

I could offer, worth my life in that moment,
the one thing that could get me back home.