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APPLES Come buy my fine wares, Plums, apples and pears. A hundred a penny, In conscience too many: Come, will you have any? My children are seven, I wish them in Heaven; My husband’s a sot, With his pipe and his pot, Not a farthen will gain them, And I must maintain them. ONIONS Come, follow me by the smell, Here are delicate onions to sell; I promise to use you well. They make the blood warmer, You’ll feed like a farmer; For this is every cook’s opinion, No savoury dish without an onion; But, lest your kissing should be spoiled, Your onions must be thoroughly boiled: Or else you may spare Your mistress a share, The secret will never be known: She cannot discover The breath of her lover, But think it as sweet as her own. HERRINGS Be not sparing, Leave off swearing. Buy my herring Fresh from Malahide, Better never was tried. Come, eat them with pure fresh butter and mustard, Their bellies are soft, and as white as a custard. Come, sixpence a dozen, to get me some bread, Or, like my own herrings, I soon shall be dead.

Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast. Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness. In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother, his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world. I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed. Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them. But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.

Mother, I have been devastated all my life. I never said anything. That’s why I wear a parachute. Why I tiptoed from my bedroom to yours, and lay my head on the beige carpet for fear of worse. Were there sirens? There were. Were there familiar songs? Yes. I am afraid of the beds I have been in. In the morning there was the heel of your boot sharper than before. Mother, what do I do with your mail? Do you want to keep this snake in the basement? What about the kitten? Do you want all these photographs of other people’s children? The temperature in the lizard’s cage is dropping. Let’s be realistic. If I open the windows the birds will come in and eat out the eyes. Mother, I am bereft. Mother, I wear your necklace and nothing else. Mother, I never. Nevermind. Let’s be fatalistic. The neighbors know I’m down here. I can hear them watching. Mother, after they take your eyes I will sew the lids myself.

Years later they find themselves talking about chances, moments when their lives might have swerved off for the smallest reason. What if I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning? What if you’d been out, as you were when I tried three times the night before? Then she tells him a secret. She’d been there all evening, and she knew he was the one calling, which was why she hadn’t answered. Because she felt— because she was certain—her life would change if she picked up the phone, said hello, said, I was just thinking of you. I was afraid, she tells him. And in the morning I also knew it was you, but I just answered the phone the way anyone answers a phone when it starts to ring, not thinking you have a choice.

When you finally, after deep illness, lay the length of your body on mine, isn’t it like the strata of the earth, the pressure of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings, sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings talking about nothing, and the brief fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious silences of animals grazing, the moving water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock. How to bear the weight, with every flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when the weight is gone, the way a woman whose neck has been coiled with brass can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love, it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit. When you strip it, grasping the edge of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could, you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin and carry it on your back. This is not neat and white and lacy like a wedding, not the bright effervescence of champagne spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral bloody union that is love, but beyond love. Beyond charm and delight the way you to yourself are past charm and delight. This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love, the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.

No more alone sleeping, no more alone waking, Thy dreams divided, thy prayers in twain; Thy merry sisters tonight forsaking, Never shall we see, maiden, again. Never shall we see thee, thine eyes glancing. Flashing with laughter and wild in glee, Under the mistletoe kissing and dancing, Wantonly free. There shall come a matron walking sedately, Low-voiced, gentle, wise in reply. Tell me, O tell me, can I love her greatly? All for her sake must the maiden die!

When you are angry it’s your gentle self I love until that’s who you are. In any case, I can’t love this anger any more than I can warm my heart with ice. I go on loving your smile till it finds its way back to your face.

The first retainer he gave to her was a golden wedding ring. The second—late at night he woke up, leaned over on an elbow, and kissed her. The third and the last— he died with and gave up loving and lived with her.

Why should a foolish marriage vow, Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now When passion is decay'd? We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could, Till our love was lov'd out in us both: But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: 'Twas pleasure first made it an oath. If I have pleasures for a friend, And farther love in store, What wrong has he whose joys did end, And who could give no more? 'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, Or that I should bar him of another: For all we can gain is to give our selves pain, When neither can hinder the other.

We communicated by cheeses, unwrapping them gingerly, parting the crust with a fork, tasting dew, must, salt, raising an eyebrow, or we let chianti talk for us, rolling it in the glass, staring—it was dark and shiny as the pupil, and stared back— or we undressed each other; we took long walks hand in hand in the vineyards, the pastures, resenting each other bitterly for our happiness that excluded us as surely as the world did, mountain after mountain.