Again I looked out the window.

All around me, the morning still dark.

The mountain’s outline there, but not the mountain.

Then a neighbor’s facing plate-glass filled

with the colors, acute and tender, of a Flemish painting.

Corals, blues.

Which seemed to be a preview of the future but were,

I knew, this moment simply looking elsewhere,

like a woman who has wept for weeks who realizes

that she is also hungry.

BAD YEAR

Even in this bad year,

the apples grow heavy and round.

Three friends and I trade stories:

biopsy, miscarriage, solitude,

a parent’s unravelling body or mind.

What is reliable? What do you hold?

I demand of the future, later.

The future—whose discretion is perfect—

says nothing, but rolls another

apple loose from its grip.

A hopeful yellow jacket comes to hunt

the crack, the point of easy entry.

SERRANO PEPPER

Grief as with the serrano pepper:

first there is actual flavor, then only heat.

What predator insect or mammal, what

backward-leaning desire,

was such blinding meant to protect from?

The self can be seared away, can be taken.

The hoarded honeys and angers, the very names, taken.

One moment: the hoof of the horse propped up, at rest.

Then the next.

THIS MUCH IS PROMISED

Anna Kamieska, when you prayed

for what you were sure would be granted, you prayed for this:

a life of much suffering.

Reading your words, why do the heart’s scales shift?

It is not the gladness of chickens, content to enter the night-coop.

Rather the shocked happiness

of the child who wakes one morning alone, knowing herself abandoned,
and makes breakfast, dresses neatly, sets out for school.

Learns to forge notes from home.

It goes on this way for weeks.

And though they will take her back,

find in another city a lost great-aunt or older cousin,

she does not forget.

Let others imagine those hours as frightened, as lonely.

Asked, she says nothing.

That child’s silence, Anna Kamieska, calm as unmined iron,

I offer you here, next to your own.

I set it beside your trapped bumblebee, your untranslatable window.

IN A ROOM WITH FIVE PEOPLE, SIX GRIEFS

In a room with five people, six griefs.

Some you will hear of, some not.

Let the room hold them, their fears, their anger.

Let there be walls and windows, a ceiling.

A door through which time

changer of everything

can enter.

ASK MUCH, THE VOICE SUGGESTED

Ask much, the voice suggested, and I startled.

Feeling my body like the trembling body of a horse

tied to its tree while the strange noise

passes over its ears.

I who in extremity had always wanted less,

even of eating, of sleeping.

Agile, the voice did not speak again, but waited.

“Want more”—

a cure for longing I had not thought of.

But that is how it is with wells.

Whatever is taken refills to the steady level.