hospice bed, when you could hardly move,

and as soon as I fitted myself in

along you, like the last piece of a puzzle,

we both passed out into sleep. When I drove north,

out of a city of plague, my car—

your car which you sold me for the list price—

was packed with notebooks in which our stories

are held, balanced in their slow dance

up and down and up. My epidermis

looks pretty, to me, tonight, frail

and real, like rills in sand which water

rippled. I liked to talk with you about the

golden crown the internet rabbi

said you would be wearing, after death,

at the feast. And I love, now, seeing

in the web of my glistening wrist-skin that I am

already part with thee, tender and

permanent is the night.

Quarantine

When I left the city for the house in the woods,

slowly I got to know the room where I sat

on the bed all day and looked through its arabesque foot

at the fireplace under the beveled mantel

where the oval mirror was balanced vertical,

and sometimes a brass ball cast a bent

spear of sun

onto the glass which

bounced a brilliant fish-hook onto

the ceiling. Outside the window, the worn

plastic siloes of black oil seed

dangled like the bars of a score, the songbirds in a

darting frenzy around them.

Elsewhere, people sicken and die.

Elsewhere, people starve, and thirst,

and hide by dawn, and walk by evening,

and perish, and their parents perish.

I try to hide from knowing that.

I send money, I send for a cotton

dress, for the hot weather,

for the eating and drinking and writing, describing

the luxuries of my vantage point

in plenty and safety. I do not give

enough—and my taxes are spent, by the orange

cockatoo, in the White Man House,

on bailing out bankers. O.K., spend

the rest of the day sending money

to the hungry—pay back a tithe of what

generations of my family stole.

I am of a people of thieves,

and beaters of children. I was not beaten

because of my race, but because I belonged

to my mother, and I was a girl, and a child,

and obedient—I mean sane—I never

thought of saying no to her

until I was a head taller than my mother.

And I did not deserve to be beaten, but now

I see it—I have not ever, in my life,

been beaten outside my gender, or my family, or my color.

8 Steps of 2 Steps Down

First there was a sudden rattle.

Then, loud clattering and crunching.

It seemed to be coming from below me, I went

to the top of the basement stairs and turned on the

light and turned my big feet to the

side and walked down the narrow steps

between the steep risers, and over to the tame

infernal furnace. Somewhere inside it there were

snaps and crackles and pops like the elves with