After Months of Careful Deliberation my love has decided to take me apart. She says I’ve been forgetting things lately, that she wants to see me laid out on the floor so she can tell what’s broken and replace it. My love is good with her hands; she loves to examine things closely, to figure out by touching how the world works. As a child in Colorado, she tied flies and caught the limit. And she doesn’t mind gutting things, cutting things, mending. She’s an expert with a map. When we drove cross country in a VW bus, twenty years ago, she had to crawl between the front tires and hold a connection every time we started up. I turned the key. That was the trip we drove to Northern Maine to visit her old friend in his cabin in the woods. Snow fell as we drove although it was only October. That was the trip we got lost in the woods in a blizzard, looking for this old friend who knew about trees and the way water flows underground for thousands of years before we drink it, who’d taught her so many wonderful facts about nature. And I just followed her, yearning to see something wild, a moose or even a bear, wondering where this great friend was living, hoping we’d never find him.