I give her chances all the time — not to make
her the mom for me. But I’m just passing through
her stop, on a middle track, seeing her go left
across my window while she stands on the platform,
There are no clouds. Thunder out of nowhere.
The boar herd at a gallop through the woods.
Haunch to haunch twisting through the brush and weeds
like shoals through seas, like starlings through the air.
Just because it’s made doesn’t mean it’s anything
but natural. A thin line skirting the shore, no matter
how long, it appears tiny in the extent of
the ocean it inhabits, the water that is the only thing
He got up. It was there. And it was growing
from much the same place it had been before;
it had followed him to sleep without his knowing
and, once he rose, had crept up to the door.
I shall die in due course on a day of rain.
Not in the last bed by the exit, please,
with a loud sitcom on the gogglebox
but in an armchair during a sunshower
When they escort you to my body they will burn,
when I am watching from that other country,
when you are weary of embellishments
death insists upon, the wilting pastels,
She kept the potatoes beneath the kitchen sink
in a dank place I never dared to enter.
But at fall planting time Mother always sent me
down into that moldy smelling cupboard,
