After Walden

by Sara Moore Wagner

 

I am leaving out the I as if it were bread
on the grocery list, as if it were an empty egg carton
filled with soil, leaving out the I, that small soldier
of egoism. Let it out like those little painted
ladies the children grew from caterpillars,
right before a rainstorm, how they hop on the grass
and there is the dog. Isn’t it beautiful:
nature wants to take, to break open
each moment, face or mouth, needle
jabbed into a bicep. Mother. How much
should we do before it’s time to give a body
over to science or to ashes, to dress it in its best
things. How can the speaker ask about best
practices. We are leaving out the I,
have left the I like the child we never wanted,
in the kitchen at her grandmother’s, mouth
full of dry toast asking why. We don’t know why,
have never known why a man or anyone else goes
into the woods alone, what he expects to be there
when he comes back, something hot like a body or meal.
Something like a why and when. Something
to calm him. And Thoreau tells us "every man 
is tasked to make his life worthy."
And it’s only the women who want to go out
and claim the I like a city, which is our city,
who want to stand in the rain undone by it.

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