I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

ROAD KILL

ROAD KILL What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. — Stanley Kunitz My first lessons in what it meant to have a body were nothing sexual, even though they had everything to do with hunger. (Think of Eve in her cravings for knowledge eating the world and losing everything.) I would not stop browsing through death’s extensive wardrobes and began to feel cheated by those that remained unopened even after they’d been kissed with such force that lariats and loops of intestine broke loose and spilled out of their mouths. Finding them at dawn was best, as if they had broken through from Eden—through the door I fell asleep to find—and had slipped, somehow, off night’s black decks. I had my favourite: the crow cemented to the road, its wings from tip to shoulder loose and lifting on the draft as we went past. In half-sleep I’d often felt my own hands flitter like this. Weight of the body. Weight of death. What difference? The dead were specific and singular 100 and possessing a body meant certain loneliness. I remember the Peugeot in the road where it had stalled; my mother lamenting and my father turning away, his shirt smooth across the width of his back; and the doe, eyes closed, in her own troubled suspension, a froth of warning at her lips; blood and beneath the blood a polished blink of intestine. And there I was, reaching out to touch the pallium of darker hair around the doe’s thin shoulders as her hooves fluttered and clattered lightly together like dice. I thought the dead would step out of their torn pockets on the tarmac and come forward, like gods, through their own absence; I thought the flesh was a door but it was always a mirror, a pan-flash, a wrung-out gleam, the afterburn of effort. Shattered windbreak of ribs. Gullet’s sleeve. And how easy it was to overlook the heart’s plump slipper, there between the lungs’ little kitbags. But the dead were good to me; they graced me with a new language, with nacreous and viscera; taught me that the body is the only mouth in which appetite rehearses its singing. This hunger, I thought, was the soul in disguise and this became the belief I began to inhabit, and this 101 belief became a problem: think of Eve in her cravings for knowledge eating the world and losing everything. I don’t know how a girl learns that it isn’t polite to give herself over, like an animal, to the oblivion of appetite; that her displays of hunger make others nervous. But I devised new ways of looking—noticing the dead on the road up ahead and positioning my gaze so I could look, on reaching them, without turning my head. And it’s true: if you disguise something well enough, even you yourself can fail to recognize it. A day came when I failed to pinpoint the exact spot on the tarmac. And then, a day when I stopped trying. The song pulled its tongue from every grass blade. The lit runway of every leaf went nowhere. My desire became oblique. Later, I would look at men this way, with a hunger clamouring at the back of my throat where words should be. Hive in a box. A craving that had swallowed nothing but itself for years and forgotten its own name. 102 ...