After the family surgeon has severed my hand and wrist from the forearm. 
And I have carefully washed the separated hand with the connected hand. 
And done its fingernails, and put a drop of perfume at the pulse of the wrist. 

In the hollow provided he beaches his canoe, fastens it to a willow, then walks into the village. He finds there a classmate from his old alma mater, goes out drinking, comes back late.

The German fellow comes when I least suspect him. He appears hanging around. He walks down my chimney, settles on a footstool, talks about the weather.

I turn to enter, turning from those frozen
Sunfields, when I see the rage of flakes,
Diminished into shaves of gold, and streaming

Aloof, Tom planted the Garden.
Peas spring up there, he ordered;
tiny green arcs cracked the soil.

Mealtimes are reminders, says Tom,
of a beautiful marriage
between the organic and the mineral.

Tom peers from his tent.
The enemy is barely visible.

Knowledge defeats its own end
approaching the state of heaven
when it envisions

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—

“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look