our initials on the cereal box—we born

of plenty, and ignorant of the fact.

In the morning the oil man came in his truck,

and we put on our masks and bowed to each other

in a feudal dance, and he descended. When he left,

he said a mouse had gone into the fan. Now I

know what it sounds like when someone enters the system.

After

After the quarter-ton bear walks past me,

left to right, six feet away,

I notice that now I start breathing heavily

halfway up my dozen stairs—then I

lie on the bed and pant for a while.

And the tremor is worse, so that, when I’m cooking, I am

literally throwing a few ingredients together,

salt and sugar and raw rice on the floor around my feet.

My equipment for staying alive is wearing out,

my screen when I close it leaks bone-gel on the keys,

and the skin of my forearms hangs down in watered-silk rivulets.

I think I had thought I might be spared the extreme of dying.

On one of his last nights, my darling began caroling,

mad songs, as his brain was going—wild and terrible

but funny, too, I think I thought I might

live for 100 more years to describe those solos.

And Galway—maybe I would go on and on singing him since he no

longer could.

But when I saw, in the last portrait, Willy’s eyebrow

still cocked as if hunting, attentive to something at a distance,

one canine curved, a milk-thorn in his mouth,

and the bedlinen his body was wrapped in tied at the waist in a

powerful knot,

Willy’s head emerging as a curly off-white harvest bouquet.

My mouth warbled and my eyes poured

as if from the watercolor of the blue pitcher resting on his

winding-sheet

with the blue Thank You—Willy in his cloud

setting into the mountain.

Someday I will run out of tears—

they are honored now to be shedding for Willy and Bwindi,

and Galway and Charlie. And maybe, if I’m lucky,

Bobbie and Catherine might bundle me up for my wash-day,

wrap me in swaddling clothes and lay me

in the manger of the earth, with Carl, and Hazel.

Anatomy Lesson for the Officer

That is your head. That is your heart.

Elbow, bicep, knee, thigh.

And the valve in back of you, your behind,

I think it may be a genital part which

holds your genital part from in front.

I am not saying Go f. yourself.

You have done that. You have f’d our species.

I am saying, That is your holster, your gun,

your handcuffs. And those are his hands in your cuffs.

And that is a human throat you are kneeling

on. That is our throat, our brother’s,

our son’s, maybe our father’s throat.

That is your mother’s, your father’s, your son’s,

your daughter’s throat. That is your daughter’s throat.

My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together

After nine months safe and well

in a room alone, I was sitting facing