FIELD DRESSING
My grandfather taught me how to
peel an apple with a pocket knife.
Said if you do it right,
the skin comes away in one long ribbon,
a red snake coiling at your feet.
I was eight,
old enough to know that every lesson
from a man who grew up poor was
secretly about survival.
The knife moved slowly through the flesh.
Not cutting, but persuading every secret
from the fruit’s core.
Years later,
I watched him gut a deer behind the shed.
The same hands, same patience.
He opened the body like a letter
he’d been long expecting.
Steam rose from the cavity
into the November air.
The woods stood silent around us.
Even the crows seemed willing to
wait.
I remember thinking how strange
it was that something could be
so recently alive and already
becoming something else.
Now I am older than that memory.
The pocket knife sits in my desk drawer.
The blade stained dark along the hinge
that bows to never break.
There are times I take it out
and turn it over in my hands,
because I understand now
what he was trying to teach me.
That every living thing must
eventually surrender what it
carries inside.
The deer. The apple.
The body. The heart.
And that love is nothing more
than standing beside the opening,
long enough to bare witness
to what holds on.
