1. So many years of nightly death have made us practiced, professional.   2. Death on the other hand is scripted, sheep-worn, muzzy, and tastes bland as a tomb.…

  And maybe I’ll go back someday and stand in the shadow of the crab apple tree, look up at the window of the old apartment, stand under the leaves…

  A wife a mother a moth her   wings whaling against the kitchen window.   He loves her which is why he builds   two knotted shutters that close…

  You young men, you guns and shovels digging your perfect country in the loam,   you do not yet know what it is to cluster, to break along a…

  She did not want me to see her riding her sad whales           through the green waves. She told me this as I helped her…

  The dog’s bark slips through the wall of the house—a large dog, I can tell, and lonely.   Maybe she turns in circles on her rug. Maybe she settles…

  (Natural History Museum)                                                                 Since all I recall of eighth-grade Biology       is the fleshy balloon of Mr. Manfree’s face, and the gelatinous, white-bellied bodies  …

  are all black & blue & red. Spread out. Coloring the sofa, the ottoman, the living room floor. He worries you will step   on them. Interrupt their destination…

  a blacksnake crossed the gravel in the afternoon, moving from one field to the other, undulant across the road and eventually ending. The earth, when dust under its muscles,…

  June 2014   1   A day they said   my mother just mayfly life   rush fly drive ten years ago through just-   greened trees bleeding hearts by the…