You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.

Somehow I know, I know these things,
such as when I will have a shepherd’s
bad luck, forever the same horrible creed
of a hunter, and my heart starts to bleed.

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot
avoid something, as well, of what
the river that day cast before me,
the musculature of the rowers’ arms,

Wild asters. A blue
wasp shudders in the gravel.
Laundry on the line:
yesterday, the day before.

For so long, I have wanted relatively nothing
Except, perhaps, this chance to write it down:
Here, for example, near a fire in a cold house,
A wide, full valley out my window

One of these days she will lie there and be dead.
I’ll take her out back in a garbage bag
and bury her among my sons’ canaries,
the ill-fated turtles, a pair of angelfish:

Fingering the tourmaline amulet
strung around her neck, she hopes to channel
a “plasma”—ethereal and healing—
that might resuscitate her blood. Doctors,

A lovely suburban colonial,
built in the 1950s
(that era of civil defense)
had a bomb shelter in the basement

At the left, the ax; at the right, the saw.
The ax in the block, the saw on the sawhorse.
Sawdust smothers the walk. Sitting in the

Of course it’s a poem no man could withstand, all that forbidding power
Of the glance and the long sweetness of the slow analysis, 
Sweetness that drew him: 
                                         into the gristle of seeds,