The difficulties, in passion,
are not news: the knot at the throat,
the lipstick that smears, the skirt

You hoarded oyster shells through the R months;
they jut from the backyard garden like unwashed ears
of earth, and listen to your footsteps growing heavier.

Only the dead don’t know
what heaven’s like. For the rest
extrapolation is possible.

He slept on his hands.
On a rock.
On his feet.

In the unshaded hill
where you kill
every day I have climbed

Fever and ooze, fever and ooze: 
Pronoun by pronoun, verb by irregular verb, 
Winter grows great with spring: March: 

It was a summer for sitting naked in
The backyard, the deep drizzle deploying the young
As an aspect of the lately-discovered elemental.

“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look

This is how I saved one animal’s life,
I raised the lid of the stove and lifted the hook
that delicately held the cheese—I think it was bacon—

Two verticals lie down,
each to the other, a horizon,
each to the other,