snowmelt necklace around the throat,

and out in the air, only the head,

old basket of everything,

and the gray hair, bush of fog lightning.

And now, take a breath, and take that

air with its pheromones of fallen pine needles

down into the enormous chamber,

the upside-down mountain range of your childhood,

your eyes open, seeing into the

bands, the stripes, of creation, yellow-green,

turquoise, cobalt, indigo, slate,

the elements from which matter will be made,

and then—surfacing rushing gasping—

throw yourself back.

this is just to say

(note left in Room 1724 of the Indianapolis Hilton)

that the pores

in the pear

are not just

in the skin

glossy

and pink-golden

but in the epidermis,

under the epithelium.

I left you the twenty

because I have extra

and I left you the truffles

because I am fat,

but I left you the pear

because it is perfect.

Even more than wanting to eat it

I wanted you to have it.

To Chase, After the Diagnosis

Visible through the stove’s glass door,

a log lies, unburning, so I open the

flue, and small flames begin to go on,

like lights in a house in the middle of the night,

until the fire is wild hair.

Dear friend, whose clipped tomboy cap

springs from that shapely head, the surgeons

will make their careful, clean way

inside you, through the locks, through

the doors, chamber by chamber, until

they come to the room with the intruder, and they will

remove it, and test it, and know if they have to

remove, in turn, the furniture

from the room, and the books from the shelves, and the shelves

from the walls, and the walls from the struts, to take you

down to the frame of your next score

of years with us, with the dogs, and the foxglove

and the purple carrots, and the mosses and ferns,

and the granite sluiceways in the wilderness

at the upper lake, and the streams in those creeks

which all your life have run beside you

like napes under your palms, like the gray

hounds accompanying Artemis as she

speeds, fleet, alert, between the trees.

To Chase, During Her Surgery

Above me, outside, between the window and the eave,

there’s a spider walking on the sky—walking upside

down, with finicky steps, as if the sky

is sticky, like a kitchen floor

on pie-baking day. Are you in surgery still, do the

surgeons seem on their backs, on the upside-down

ceiling, are you floating, prone, above them?

I know, you are supine, you are opened up,

layer by layer, incision by incision, their

knives and forks and threads and needles are the

anthers and filaments and stigmas and styles

sprouting from within you, like their gloved hands,

their arms enormous stamens and pistils,

and with their magnified eyes and gauze

clothes they’re like giant insects, hovering,

drawn to your need, as to the scent

of a Nymphaea odorata,

and to the problem of your intricate

geometry, and to the mortal housekeeping