She was not so sweet as you would think.
Not in the damp of her hair, not in the joint of her bones.
This you can believe:

Soon I will become an elephant.
My ears will grow and begin to droop.
They will turn grey and floppy.

I have a partridge egg,
a gift from a man
who found it in some field straw

Even in Rembrandt’s portraits,
they don’t look like a ruling class,
and their wives are no less pronounced, prizing money not blood, merit

We are ten minutes late. They
are very sweet, hiding their
rage under pink sugar, a boiled

When you were a little girl you lived on a street that went up a hill and down it again, which gave you from the be- ginning a sense of purpose, a glandular sympathy with the ebb and flow of all life. You weren’t easily fooled, even as a child of seven you looked at the butcher with grave 

After layoff in Richland after
moving into the 65-a-month prefab a
packing crate in an empty lot with

He strikes a match and she strikes a match;
these first two
go out before they can light the candle

was dead, face down
in the river, until I raised her
to air on the dock by her tangled

When he came home from the mines,
he went through the cellar; stripped
off his blackened work-clothes