Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.

And they sat—as though paralysis preceding death
Had nailed them there.

Everything went in the car.
Slept in the car, slept
Like angels in the duned graveyards,
Being gone.

After Edgartown
We went the other way.

You let him
Rob me. But
How long? how long?
Past cutlery I saw
My body stretching like a tear
Along the paper.

Always nights I feel the ocean
Biting at my life.

I watched her tucking skin
As though she missed her young, while bits of onion
Misted snow over the pronged death.

You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don’t.

As endlessly she picks
Her spent kleenex into dust, always
Staring at that man, hearing the click,
Click of his brain’s whirling empty spindle …

You hover loyally above my head. I close
My eyes.

I feel
No end. No end. It stalls
In me. It’s still alive.

Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared …
I want you.

I saw
Venus among those clamshells, raw
Botticelli: I have known no happiness so based in truth.

We heard they live on love.
What now? You miss my care? Your yard ripens
To a ward of roses, like a year ago when staff nuns
Wheeled me down the aisle …

You couldn’t look. I saw
Converted love, your son,
Drooling under glass, starving …

We are eating well.
Today my meatman turns his trained knife
On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.

Her pride
And joy she said. I have no pride.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

Flies, snails. Asleep I saw these
Beings as complacent angels of the land and air.

My first house shall be built on these sands,
My second in the sea.

In Westchester, the crocus spreads like cancer.
This will be the death of me. I feel the leaves close in,
Promise threaten from all sides and above.

Dawn off Georgia stole her whole
Hold’s gold and slew that living cargo.

Words fail me.

I know what’s slipping through my fingers.