Hunting along the logging road
swamped through to Pockwock Lake,
we stopped beside the spring to drink—
startled a drowsing snake.

Your will is done. Its promise, that I fled,
Drove me from friends and from the high homeland,
Where bear-grass stung like snakebite and my skin

In the two photographs I have of her,
taken over ten years apart, she wears
the same plain dress. In the first,

I look up at the clock.
It’s time to go, so
I cover the typewriter

So that all day he’s stared the mountain down
its myth of windowsill, followed by, live, sight
of an oak shaking as a fever into leaf, alone

Tired of the tally of give and take,
until (worth it at last) I found your store
past the nickle and diming phases of dance.

It’s slippery, the little by little you’re left with.
thread of a peacock in profile
glimpsed on a chimney,

 …Then you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on,
      I said, and I admit he took it well,
      hampered as he was by my kind of sight.

Dementia’s wheeled to the window
for the fireworks, like boneless 

Tighter and tighter wringing my hands
Till they be riven—
Between us are not the miles of earth