Lifting his head from the paper he noticed her orange hair.

In the drawing room you sat shaven / among cleavages rank with sweat.

Somehow the days take care of themselves.
Desire that feels as if it will scorch
The skin of wanting doesn’t get fulfilled

I wake at night and pace
the length of my digestive tract
to where the path obscures

 Who is in snow?
Where is snow?
Is it raining ice?

The high elms provide
A pillared avenue
Where only birds parade,

Cutlet carved from our larger carcasses:
thus were you made —from spit and a hug.
The scratchy stuff you’re lying on is wool.

During the screened-porch dinner of corn on the cob,
pork chops, tomatoes like red meat, warm and bleeding,
I felt the first stirring. The air moved, cracked the damp

First, go to Hell—I mean, seek out the Halls
                of Hades and his consort,
Persephone the Dread. Here’s what you’ll need:

Roots and rocks emerge from the forest path like half-
      spoken thoughts,
or as Thoreau would put it, the earth is saying “rock.” And