He offers his adulteries the way
our cat presents yard kill. And I sweep
the corpses away, complicit keeper

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,

his wrists throbbing under tight-bound cords,
the slender joints reddening, each of us hoping
to catch his other-blooded kind of time.

Yet I knew something of how a hero’s wife lived,
      the marble throne of patience at her back.