Bruce Snider

1 Nothing passes,Lord,but what you allow. Mornings the milky sap on my knuckles burns. Last night the piglets fought then suckled in the barn. Still no word. Our one cow grazes but won’t come in. The pamphlets say: Patience is required. I say, let’s try again but John blames the state, the neighbors, the way we wrote our bios, filling out the forms. Across the road our neighbor starts his truck while God, feather by feather, downs a wren — swollen, its black eyes shiny, small dark tongue. In the drainpipe, something slithers wet and stuck. A race runner? A ground skink shedding skin? Lizards, John tells me,can’t bear live young. 2 John tells me:lizards can’t bear live young. Another of   God’s mysteries: hard rain muddying the corn. The kind woman at the agency said,it takes longer for certain types of couples

I wake to leafless vines and muddy fields, patches of standing water. His pocketknife waits in my dresser drawer, still able to gut fish. I pick up his green shirt, put it on for the fourth day in a row. Outside, the rusty nail he hammered catches me, leaves its stain on everything. The temperature drops, the whole shore filling with him: his dented chew can, waders, the cattails kinked, bowing their distress. At the pier, I use his old pliers to ready the line: fatheads, darters, a blood worm jig. Today, the lake’s one truth is hardness. When the trout bite, I pull the serviceable things glistening into air.