I’d get my own portrait. I’d show it to the next boy
before I got undressed, “Here’s what you’re getting.”

Will it rain? The rain says it will
as thunder pools in every vowel,

The perfect ease of fish in perfect tombs.
She hugs her knees. her sky, her soul’s, small proof

by sweet flour, sweet failure,
a daughter married old, a son gone bad.

she knew that moo shu pork
remains his singular post-coital consolation,

and the sky, to, has its heavy book,
fat with the glossy photos of someone else’s dream,

Age, he says, is just another color,
one, frankly, he would prefer not to use.

look around them, they spare themselves
the torments of community.

Because he resembled her father
back in DesMoines she did not
feel frightened when he took

The hemlocks, a wood nymph approaches
Walking her two small dogs.