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. 

For all I can do,A last barn, dark as a plug of chewing tobacco,Crumbles into chipmunk holes. Then

While I wrote, a butterfly, that critic, rode my wrist.

The time of year when all my blood is thick,
This is the season when my heart must die.

Shortly before the noon is always high—

In the environs of the funeral home 
The smell of death was absent. All I knew 
Were flowers rioting and odors blown 

Walking a long time in the fields of the dead
I stopped where the grass
flared thickly, and leaned on a stone

Yesterday rain fell in torrents, 
stripping the branches of leaves and 
deepening the arroyo. Now, 

   With no less joy than grief and consternation
that You, not they, were the victim doomed to die,
the chosen souls saw great gates in the sky