Mirrored Lodges

Two stick-built lodges mirror each other

on the eastern edge of the marsh.

The beavers are no where to be seen.

Under water, I imagine the just-born kits

nursing in the dome they will return to until,

like all offspring, they move away.

Once, on a marriage retreat, I told my husband

that he and my father were like two islands

that I was constantly swimming between.

My father, a gay prison warden’s son,

my husband, a Catholic war veteran,

were both operating within the boundaries

of scarred and rule-based masculinity—

each resenting the other for their sameness,

for their collective need to claim me like land.

Beavers build colonies to keep their kin close,

using castors to scent-mark their territory.

“It’s like they’re in a pissing contest,” I told

my therapist a few years after I married,

but I kept breast-stroking between each man’s

need for daughter, wife—for the femininity

they could not reconcile in themselves.

When I was young, I played a game called

“Property” with my brother: the couch cushions

our continents, the crevices our ocean.

The game: stay on the side to which you belong.

My brother always lost by forgetting—

by letting a toe cross the line.

I always won by vigilance—

by monitoring the edges so I could yell,

“PROPERTY!” as if I were practicing

what it felt like to own myself.

Fell, haul, swim, weave, mud-pack, seal: work.

Swim, row, breast-stroke, swim, row: work.

“Industrious,” beavers are called, constantly fixing.  

“Excessive caretaking,” my mentor called

it when I told her how exhausting it was

to navigate between islands.

The beavers’ territory markings at the marsh

are invisible to the onlooker.

The water is still as glass, the grasses unruffled.

At the south edge of the dam stands a lone lodge

tucked into a thumbnail bay.

It is newer, piled higher, stands more erect—

looks more like a statement than a dwelling.

After I got sober, I told my husband and my father

that I was going to drown if I kept rowing,

that I was my own property.

Except it sounded more like this:

“I’m tired of being the go-between.”

What I meant was: there is a cost to the industry

of being a woman, of being asked to take sides.