At your touch, in the first days, I tremble like the hunter’s dog that sits before a gift frightening in its beauty. At the man’s side, the dog shivers with attention in the 5 a.m. dark, waiting for the shot. The hunter’s high waders smell overwhelmingly of the gear shed, fusty mice nests and gasoline and powdered sulfur for snakes. And bitter tobacco smell from a pouch in the pocket. But there is also the focusing smell of this marsh and this sawgrass and cypress, and the dog keeps his tense vigil. The teen boy with a ruddy face, to the man’s left, holds a twelve gauge, his father a twenty. At the shot, the dog’s taut tremble releases to a lunge under the chaos of wild wings. He is a sleekest vessel in the frigid water, intent to retrieve the gamebird as trained. So suited with his webbed feet and dense coat, his tail like a rudder, his mark accurate. In seconds, he’s got the bird in his strong but soft mouth.
Far up the breeding line, his ancestors rode fishing boats in the waters of Newfoundland and fetched fish that slipped free of the nets. The British bred them with hunting dogs and trained them to be gentle, though rarely by gentle means. They must hold the game so tenderly, as if toothless, harmless.
The dog returns with the wood duck, but it is only wounded, wing-tipped. Gently he brings his gift to the man’s feet to be killed. The bird lies shaking in the marsh under the mist of the dog’s generous pant and is too pretty, too stunning. The boy privately mourns the final separation of skull from neck. The yellow-banded bill and green headcrest so signature, that shiny teal patch on the one intact wing.
But no, I tremble less like the dog and more like the bird in its last of life, more like a thing retrieved. From the Old French retreuver, “to find again, recover, meet again, recognize.” As if, at your touch, I am met again by you whom I must have known in another time and place. I am recognized. I tremble not because of your virtue or promise, not because of hope unacquainted with immense failure, but because this feels inevitable, something recovered that was long cherished but lost, like a gold locket. Touch like a foreknowing of who I am and what I am to do.
I am thinking of your touch as I await a mammogram in the waiting room at the ob-gyn clinic. Small breasted, flattish bellied, I sit across from a woman highly pregnant, her breasts like new wine sacks, her body a great plenty, and I neither food nor shelter for anyone, though I know it’s an unimaginative comparison. My doctor has just told me there is increased risk for breast cancer in breasts that have not milkfed. This seems a cruel fact for those childless desiring children. When I go in with the useless apron and the technician struggles to knead each small breast into something substantive enough for clear imaging, I get a picture of me getting cancer, set on the road to dying—I’d wear white, I’d lose my hair, I’d put my bed by the big window, and would you still fondle my breast in my last days? Put it in your mouth like a pup, retrieving, retrieving the almost-dead?
My similes keep turning; now you are the dog, I the bird. After all, the Old French stem trouver, “to find,” far up the linguistic line, probably roots back to the Proto-Indo-European trep, “to turn.” So, we turn. You with your great hand that has indeed held dead birds tenderly and has also held your children and pencils and poems and a deer dead immediately from a clean rifle shot—this crisp touch, not crisp as in cool, but as in bread crust broken, that sigh of steam released. Or as in dawn broken. I love so many turns of phrase.
But no, the stunning crippled bird is brought back to die whereas I, by your touch, am brought back to live, for that is what love does to us, so what am I like, then—if not dog or duck—what am I like in my trembling at your tender touch as evening falls? I am like the blind.
Labradors, with their sharp eyes and gentle mouths, are well suited to other things, too. They are a good breed for children, for one thing, and a breed that can be trained to pull a blanket over someone spilled from her wheelchair. They are water rescue dogs (webbed feet, rudder-tail); in wars, they go out to scout the dead and wounded behind enemy lines; they detect explosives with their sweet noses. And they are trained as guide dogs for the blind, to wear the harness and attend to every delicate step taken by the unsighted. I will return to the patient guide dog, but first—I am to close my eyes as the X-ray X-rays my empty milk ducts and fascia and subcutaneous fat, and imagine knowing and unknowing my own house. With eyes lost, here is the kitchen counter I grope and the stove and the radiant coffee pot. I am to walk into the woods where all the starlings descend and watch, or into the street before anyone’s gaze, shopkeeper or lowrider: I am seen and unseeing. And so I tremble as one regarded in her entirety while remaining unregarding.
“I tremble before what exceeds my seeing and my knowing,” Derrida writes in The Gift of Death. “Inasmuch as it tends to undo both seeing and knowing, trembling is indeed an experience of secrecy or of mystery.” God and death make us tremble, he says, but “what does the body mean to say by trembling?” I love the question. My body means to say that the murmuration of starlings in their gusty wave can behold my naked face and blow by it—this face you touch—though, in my blindness, I behold them not. “It is the gift of infinite love, the dissymmetry that exists between the divine regard that sees me, and myself, who doesn’t see what is looking at me.” God with such secrecy and limitless looking, God like the mammography machine seeing in fabulous detail my tissue while I see only the chunky city skyline out the clinic window from the only angle the machine permits. But that is an awful simile for God. If God is going to be in my love letter, then I will try again. I am the blind quivering under your hand because touch reveals my body as limited, ephemeral, beheld, exceeded. And there is God within the tremble: a guide dog with gaze kind and watchful. God is strong and gentle-mouthed and loyal to the death. My hand on that harness God wears, I walk the woods, I walk the road, I come to love my darkness whose possibilities are double-sleeved in my unknowing and God’s knowing.
And so now God is the dog, I the blind, and you? You are the one for whom I make mushroom soup à la Marie-Louise when I’m home from the mammogram. Celery and carrots, onion and oil, bay leaf and thyme. A slice of warm sourdough. As you know, I tend toward the ecstatic, always have, toward tears with no ostensible cause beyond the too-muchness, and, today, toward joy, now that I’ve slipped the cold machines, and ever toward trembling. I’ll try to tone it down so to not alarm you. My fingertips smell of thyme from stripping the tiny leaves from the stem, and I ask you, Shall we go on a winter hike then?
In the winter woods we climb from sapling to sapling toward the ridge and scoot down the shaley slope on our butts to the creek. When the soup wears off: late meal of venison baloney and sharp cheese from our pack. The moon with us all afternoon over the boulder fields. We stop, make our forty-five-degree angles with the earth, clutching Virginia pine, and watch our panting breath like dogs.
Things have become sparer, less dense, or maybe of greater density of moments, with similes nesting in my mind like tiny birds flopping over on each other to sleep in a heap. The day has become all spare surprise, going from the X-ray hum to the wild places in the stretch of few hours. Your touch, out here, is gloved. Still—a tremble. When dark falls, it falls after a last mighty blaze on the ridge that draws our faces up the steep gorge from the creekbed. We could disappear, but we don’t. We return home, we undress, we touch without gloves or cover.
And you tell me how, as a boy, you hunted with such dogs, with your father in Mississippi. You have had the dog lay the brilliant dead bird at your feet. I know nothing of well-bred, well-trained dogs; all mine from childhood slept in the barn and roamed free. My hound-beagle mongrel I have now I brought home from the shelter, her age ascertained from her teeth. No idea where she was whelped, all the ditches and fields running thick in her. She can’t sit or shake properly, only chews up my hardcovers and steals quickbreads from the counter and musses the rugs. Her mouth is not soft but all destruction and terror at the bunny warren in the lilies. She trembled in my arms once, when I waded into the Gulf of Mexico holding her. As calm and bathy as those gulf waters were, they were still large and swallowing. She was so light in my arms, quivering in the warm salt water.
And I lie beside you thinking how all creatures we touch are meant for death soon enough, so we must touch tenderly, and how all creatures tremble in the face of gifts frightening in their beauty. Of course I am like the hunter’s dog in his shiver before the stunning still-breathing birds in the distance, as he waits for the shot, for there is another meaning of the word turn—to turn the soil, turn it over, the deeper loam brought up into the light to reexamine. To turn it over again in my mind—yes, I am indeed like the dog before the gifts of love and joy which frighten. There is something not yet bred out of him, some wild strain, rolling in poppies and mud, and anything might happen in this pre-dawn vigil in the marsh. I know this is getting iffy for a love letter, but the real letter is the trembling itself, what my body means to say by trembling, which is perhaps all I should have said.
But one more thing: your hand on me, in the first days: we lie in the hammock and spy a group of baby raccoons clinging to their mother high in the silver maple above us. “Do you mind me touching you?” you ask. I do not mind. One of the collective nouns for raccoons is a gaze. Isn’t that wonderful? We see their eyes for a while, tiny chips of light, but soon, in the deeper evening, we can’t see them, though we know we are lit by the porch light and are thus seen and watched from above. We are like nothing but ourselves, receiving the gift.
