Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.

He sits before me now, reptilian, cold,
Worn skeletal with sorrow for his child.
He would have lied to her, were he not old

I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing
about me.
There is no reason for you to imagine
the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair.

I bike not just to get places but to get off the ground:
you don’t have to be going somewhere to be somewhere,
going.

I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down.
                                Only the night is wound up tight.
And ticking with unpaused breath.

Everything I love is young. I love you, because you are young. Satire, Epistle, the glistening inner wing of a redwing blackbird’s wing, you too are young.

I am dying young. Horace, young lover of old words, young new faces, I love you best.

After the winter thawed away, I rose,
Remembering what you said. Below the field 
Where I was dead, the crinkled leaf and blade 

let’s try a more
domestic framing, angle your hands
in the shape of a rooftop, someone was waiting