After the family surgeon has severed my hand and wrist from the forearm. 
And I have carefully washed the separated hand with the connected hand. 
And done its fingernails, and put a drop of perfume at the pulse of the wrist. 

In the hollow provided he beaches his canoe, fastens it to a willow, then walks into the village. He finds there a classmate from his old alma mater, goes out drinking, comes back late.

The German fellow comes when I least suspect him. He appears hanging around. He walks down my chimney, settles on a footstool, talks about the weather.

I turn to enter, turning from those frozen
Sunfields, when I see the rage of flakes,
Diminished into shaves of gold, and streaming

Aloof, Tom planted the Garden.
Peas spring up there, he ordered;
tiny green arcs cracked the soil.

Mealtimes are reminders, says Tom,
of a beautiful marriage
between the organic and the mineral.

Tom peers from his tent.
The enemy is barely visible.

I am William, who by nature needs to chant     triste now, I’ll make
this song from it

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—

“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look