Late at night
men entered her ground-floor
room via the window.

One of these days she will lie there and be dead.
I’ll take her out back in a garbage bag
and bury her among my sons’ canaries,
the ill-fated turtles, a pair of angelfish:

Fingering the tourmaline amulet
strung around her neck, she hopes to channel
a “plasma”—ethereal and healing—
that might resuscitate her blood. Doctors,

      You keep poking at it
finger, drill, snout & awl
till you find yourself at the back

A lovely suburban colonial,
built in the 1950s
(that era of civil defense)
had a bomb shelter in the basement

At the left, the ax; at the right, the saw.
The ax in the block, the saw on the sawhorse.
Sawdust smothers the walk. Sitting in the

Of course it’s a poem no man could withstand, all that forbidding power
Of the glance and the long sweetness of the slow analysis, 
Sweetness that drew him: 
                                         into the gristle of seeds, 

I sat at the bedside,
as I’d seen my sister do.
I told him things
I never dreamed I knew.

I took the water she gave me, a dark young woman
in a “Spanish,” off the shoulder, ruffled blouse—
a cover girl, almost (like the maiden on the Sun-
Maid raisin box), remembering to smile for tourist

is feeding his canaries on the terrace
when the Gypsies start to sing.
Dinner candles have long guttered,