She was born Sarah Gossett Ballenger—
Sarah our mother's proper name, Gossett our mother's
family name, Ballenger the name of her father.

How strange to see their faces start to worry
Into ours, and after all those years
We spent pretending we had made a life

The sun’ s suspended like a drop of amber
Above the crescent of a colonnade.
And he is standing on a gravel path

Sometimes in the evening I see
coming toward me, from a distance,
a kind of blossom: huge, blue, nodding

In fact, my hand is not a hand
but a whole house, and there is no time
but a thick, reluctant river

For a long time, a huge
ragweed has been standing
in the flowers