The droplets’ placid girth and weight. The table’s lack of ambition.

How strange it is that longing, too, becomes a small green bud,

thickening the vacant branch-length in early March.

THE PROMISE

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.

Mysteriously, they left.

As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,

who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.

It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,

only a stepping back from the petty.

I gazed at the range of blue mountains,

I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank.

Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.

Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.

There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.

The dog’s tail wagged a little in his dream.

THE HEAT OF AUTUMN

The heat of autumn

is different from the heat of summer.

One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

One is a dock you walk out on,

the other the spine of a thin swimming horse

and the river each day a full measure colder.

A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.

Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,

rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser

by color. That’s autumn heat:

her hand placing silver buckles with silver,

gold buckles with gold, setting each

on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,

and calling it pleasure.

TO WAKE AT 3:00

To wake at 3:00

and not want to go back to sleep

is different

from waking and wanting

not to go back to sleep.

Thoughts

come to the mind,

predictable almost as breath.

The day’s small errors and failures.

Wrong words that were said,

right ones that were not.

Outside the window

a truck, with yellow lights

running the length of its body

and R&L Cargo lettered large down its side,

diesels the street inexplicably backward.

Making its own deliveries,

equally exhausted, from some great distance.

DOG STILL BARKING AT MIDNIGHT

It has come to this:

three ants, seemingly separate, seemingly aimless,

wandering a shelf.

They’ve appeared and disappeared for days between jars and bottles.

Luckless, they move without pausing.

A single breath-puff could send any one to the floor.

How distant they must be from the nest—

yet none consults with another,

none turns to the others for reassurance or warmth.

In their cold bodies: calcium, carbons, a trace of nickel.

Inexhaustible solitude, how did you come so far

to waver on the slim antennae of these my sisters?

TWO WASHINGS

One morning in a strange bathroom

a woman tries again and again to wash the sleep

from her eyelids’ corners,

until she understands. Ah, she thinks, it begins.

Then goes to put on the soup,

first rerinsing the beans, then lifting the cast-iron pot

back onto the stove with two steadying hands.

TERMITES: AN ASSAY