The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives
in a chipped dish descended from another century
on that day I remember more than half my life ago

You who waited here before me
in silence mothers of silence
I always knew you were present

You have been evoked so often
like some relative in office
whom we have heard of by name

Look at you bringing 
Your children up just as formerly 
And look at me back again 

He begins by troubling your
thoughts, the egg white you drop
into a glass makes the shape of a

I have held the man in my mouth
all day, trying to find a place
to bury him, dig him up later.

A sentence is hard for a sudden         to spin into space.

See the hand perch on to fish out on the limb so to speak?

It’s not to place but the verge of,

after Pamela Argentieri’s “Continued Persistence”
O arm that spurts flowers,
Branch giving birth to water.
O tree that bows down

In life
if I could say for sure

what I have loved
there would be

no tunnel needed

This bed is all hay and honey, 
fragrant with semen; 
yet it put a crimp in Anita’s spine.