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You didn't know what was in the heap. A visitor found it to contain beggars. They sell the hollow of their hands. They show the sightseer their mouths full of filth, and let him (he can afford it) peer at the mange eating away at them. In their twisted vision his stranger's face is skewed; they are pleased with their accession, and when he speaks they spew.

I was a man and I was trying to save a woman in danger. I picked her up in my arms and flew. Flying like a frog swimming in air I ditched our nameless pursuer and landed. There was a guy waiting for us who looked like a king. Caught. Now I have to accept the punishment for saving the woman. First, we have to take a shower. The effect is to loosen the skin from the muscle until it peels off. The woman picks up the pieces of my skin and holds them in her hands and says:I will love each of these as I loved you. And I thought: This is what is called Fetish. And suddenly it came to me that the origin of the word is fe- as in female, soft, loving, silken — plus -tissue. Like tissues flying. Voicing particles waking in waves over a living body of water loose at last

Believe in this. Young apple seeds, In blue skies, radiating young breast, Not in blue-suited insects, Infesting society’s garments. Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz, Tearing the night into intricate shreds, Putting it back together again, In cool logical patterns, Not in the sick controllers, Who created only the Bomb. Let the voices of dead poets Ring louder in your ears Than the screechings mouthed In mildewed editorials. Listen to the music of centuries, Rising above the mushroom time.

Early April and there’s a light-footed feel. Nothing troubles from the darkened underbrush, and the sun’s late beauty daubs the green wood with yellows. As if for you, a thrush rills, blue pieces of silver that will dry like watermarks. Almost delicate, the hour around seven, a blown-glass bowl, edgeless and honed, made bespoke. Yet somewhere inside this evening hour, a man refutes: his fist will not burden the kitchen table. A wintered heart, hard as a knot of holly.

A birdbath ministers to the lawn chairs, all toppled: a recliner on its face, metal arms trying to push it up; an overturned rocker, curvature of the spine. Armchairs on their sides, webbing unraveled. One faces the flowers. A director's chair folded, as if prepared to be taken up.

They decide finally not to speak of it, the one blemish in their otherwise blameless marriage. It happened as these things do, before the permanence was set, before the children grew complicated, before the quench of loving one another became all each of them wanted from this life. Years later the bite of not knowing (and not wanting to know) still pierces the doer as much as the one to whom it was done: the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing, the inimitable lack of touching, the undoing undone.

Oh, come, my lad, or go, my lad, And love me if you like! I hardly hear the door shut Or the knocker strike. Oh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts, And wed me if you will! I'd make a man a good wife, Sensible and still. And why should I be cold, my lad, And why should you repine, Because I love a dark head That never will be mine? I might as well be easing you As lie alone in bed And waste the night in wanting A cruel dark head! You might as well be calling yours What never will be his, And one of us be happy; There's few enough as is.

I was young once, at least, if not beautiful. And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.

It swallows all it swallows, mass mistaken for mass, swallows it all as storm surge swallows swaths of shoreline, offers for the finding after only slivers of glass, deflects off weathered edifice, trickles through tumbledown. Deflects barely, a swallow off the surface of a farm pond. Even on cold nights, not all brilliance mimics the crystalline. Not all wisdom waits, not all that winters winters underground. Unspoken, any summons to silent predation. • I name it Forsakenness Knob, that ridge where wind and loss merge, where what I see looks like something beyond what sight can prove, frost figured as so many bare branches. And omens, my god, so many, like animal tracks, but they merge, blown over by another snow. Body they once were, mind they may since have melted into, omens may they prove.

(for my daughter) Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back. The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift. The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease, is door to the forum, is cutter of keys. In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free between her mother and her child the woman stands having emptied her hands.