Out of the darkness, men come 
     with knives. They work quickly, 
muttering back and forth. 

It was white I wanted —of snow, clouds, of sky overcast, of
       a star if you take the shine from it. Usual
           sound, light, and I wake—but sense a shift

Like orange candywrappers, writes
the daughter now, describing the time
years ago when the goldfish

She was older, sleek, and had a bite to her, but I was bolder with my knees on either side of her.

Ava taught me how to smoke
in the woods behind our high-school dorm.

Through the night Grace lives by fire.
She sings to it, she reads it poetry,
she knits and rocks and nods and…

Always the unbearable—the sting of her demands,
the threats, the way she kept me from my friends—

I’ve gone up-rivers to get rid of them
where I dispatch fish. The family
will say this is a lie

she found no reason for it setting there, the poems
not improved by poet’s name?

I think of other women,
how some are beautiful, and do not know it;
how most are not, and know;