Propped up on one elbow,
leaning his cheek on his hand,
he looks at her as she sleeps,

Waking every day the frost reasserts itself. Its relentlessness a tedium, a closure. The earth must have looked more familiar when all was water.

I'm not convinced that woman wanted him
ever to come back home. She had her business
in tapestries, those three-hour meals with men,

My mind is mush. Three days without a thought
but how to tell them I can't eat their corn
again, nor smoke that pipe that tastes like silt,

Our forest, our ocean, it stretched westward from the edge
of town. Knee-high at fireworks time, taller by August
than any child. Flat as a bed the prairie, spread quilt

Like God, I get up early, walk out in the cool of the day
to see my handiwork. Oh, Nathaniel, thou hast not done well!
I’ll post a sign: Henry Thoreau, poet and pencil-maker,

A man with angelic locks and a woman
with no head are sketched in flagrante, standing
up. Or rather, he stands, while she levitates

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

Once it was out of sight, that sea that can spill
like ink across the map of any country.
We’d heard of it, were told that all roads lead

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