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When the wind was right everything else was wrong, like the oak we thought built better than the house split like a ship on a rock. We let it stand the winter, spectral, shagged, every sky its snow, then cut it down, dismantled it in pieces like disease. Then limbs from the yellow poplar broke at will— fell from the heights like bones of the Puritans; even to gather them in bundles seemed puritanical. And the willow, by its nature, wept long tears of its overbranching, so pale they were autumnal. These we turned too easily to switches, mocking the bickering in the spruce's nesting eaves, which crows, then jays bothered all they could. The list, the list. The sycamore made maps of disappearance; the copper beech, parental in its girth, was clipped hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn't heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then love—nothing we tried would work. More apple trees that grew nowhere but down. More maples spilling sugar. More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees. Then the perilous path was planted: And a river and a spring On every cliff and tomb; And on the bleached bones Red clay brought forth. Till the villain left the paths of ease, To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Most of what happens happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me, though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin— it touches your skin warming to my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart. This intimate patois will vanish with us, its only native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire performed the sorcery we most required. They bound us in a spell time could not break. Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us.

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs—inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is done with pain: ice on the wound, the isolating tourniquet— as though to check an open vein where the self pumps out of the self would stop the second movement of the heart, diastolic, inclusive: to love is to siphon loss into that chamber. 2. What does it mean when a woman says, “my husband,” if she sits all day in the tub; if she worries her life like a dog a rat; if her husband seems familiar but abstract, a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use. They’ve reached the middle years. Spared grief, they are given dread as they tend the frail on either side of them. Even their marriage is another child, grown rude and querulous since death practiced on them and withdrew. He asks of her only a little lie, a pale copy drawn from the inked stone where they loll beside the unicorn, great lovers then, two strangers joined by appetite: it frightens her, to live by memory’s poor diminished light. She wants something crisp and permanent, like coral—a crown, a trellis, an iron shawl across the bed where they are laced together, the moon bleaching the house, their bodies abandoned— 3. In last week’s mail, still spread on the kitchen table, the list of endangered species. How plain the animals are, quaint, domestic, but the names lift from the page: Woundfin. Whooping Crane. Squawfish. Black-footed Ferret. California Least Tern. Dearest, the beast of Loch Ness, that shy, broad-backed, two-headed creature, may be a pair of whales or manatee, male and female, driven from their deep mud nest, who cling to each other, circling the surface of the lake.

a senryu sequence when I come late to bed I move your leg flung over my side— that warm gate nights you’re not here I inch toward the middle of this boat, balancing when I turn over in sleep you turn, I turn, you turn, I turn, you some nights you tug the edge of my pillow under your cheek, look in my dream pulling the white sheet over your bare shoulder I marry you again

to be gone a constant desire embarrassed for the giant leaning in for love we had enough of the dance number but                   the whirling begins it just starts silos full of air no more corn no more wheat watching myself for full details in a strange man’s pants we let the soldier board the plane shot in head three days later why are you angry you said why are you not I said

to worship tininess of a martyr observe shrinking church in rearview mirror the black deer it turns out was beige a tan doe covered in flies flesh of shame is nearly the shame of flesh pressing an unstable clock to cactus with one, two, three counts of recalibration fuck you who ask for forgiveness instead of permission                          all clocks are precarious inscrutable windows

I In September beyond the breezes and the smoke when autumn unveils its fiery shell, I think of you fragile and severe, small and immense II You were a traveler through demented and subtle geographies with your magic wand singing about Yugoslavia and Lebanon Chile and Peru —Those details on imaginary sheets, doubtful you would get lost because true history was made by women the girl-women and the old women. III When the children of war become a nebulous flame when the earth's shell is a shawl afire with gold, I name you, Marta Alvarado, arriving almost at dawn with your bony woolen gloves to open the school's doors and the defiance of your notebook.

when your man comes home from prison, when he comes back like the wound and you are the stitch, when he comes back with pennies in his pocket and prayer fresh on his lips, you got to wash him down first. you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism back into what he was before gun barrels and bars chewed their claim in his hide and spit him stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight. you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose from his hair, scrape curse and confession from the welted and the smooth, the hard and the soft, the furrowed and the lax. you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face between your palms, take crease and lid and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water, and when he opens his eyes you tell him calm and sure how a woman birthed him back whole again.

He, who had been the one to whom I had Recited my poems and then he wrote them down With his faithful scribal hand for which already He was well known and had been justly praised, Demetrius has died. He lived to be Fifteen years old, and after that four summers. Even the Caesars had heard how good he was. When he fell sick and I knew he was going to die, I didn’t want him to descend to where The Stygian shades are, still a slave, and so I relinquished my ownership of him to his sickness. Deserving by my deed to have gotten well, He knew what I had done and was grateful for it, Calling me his patron, falling free, Down to those waters that are waiting there.