Independence Day The first half was sung by wind-through-the-trees, which was very like a woman on a rocky cliff above our lake. My real mother sailed in a dinghy down below, sailed in her good girl uniform that first summer, sailed naked and hairy by the time she went to college, by the time she met my father and made him summon me. And my mother made yearning sing like a yellow bird, so the days were endless and lost behind lost. Then who was this other body of another little boy, who could pull back the air or the ground we walked across or the glassy lake we swam in; who was this mere lad who could pull any skin back and enter things completely? Was he the music that makes the world stay? But then he'd grow silent, as good as never was. So I asked my dad: Why are we, anyway? And he said to make time happen; and then he said to love. Am I living in my body or is body what I am? I'm not sure, he told me, yet breathing makes the wind. Then one morning, much later, my wife turned to me and said: I woke beside a dog. I mean it was a wolf. I mean, I get lost in your skinny sometime wilderness. And then she touched me. Outside, I reminded her, the bees are making body parts from the pollen they've gathered. We might harvest it this afternoon, sweeten our love potion, and make our own honey in the bushes. Sure. But aren't we wild enough already, she wondered, aren't our bones more ourselves the more we memorize? Like sliding down a snowy mountain peak on Independence Day, when everyone else is in the city lighting fireworks and your brother is still living in a cave and your sister is making little plaster casts of her children's body parts, so she will remember them just as they never were.