be on his knees he needs an altar something old something

once revered perhaps I could volunteer bring on the saw the guests

can bow their heads and count the rings the years

BEAR

pressed full-length against the screen unzipping it

for a better grip to help him help himself to the seed and the suet

slung high under the eave by the man

who has charged down from the bedroom onto the porch

in his white loincloth like David against Goliath

but only one good lung shouting swearing

and behind him the woman caught

at the lip of the lit kitchen

where was my sister

with her gun or would she be praying since she prays routinely

for a parking spot and there it is or would she be speechless for once

that this man so moderate so genial so unlike me

had put himself one body-length away from a full-grown bear

or would she be saying you my dear are the person who married him

which of course I did I did and I stood behind him

as he stood his ground on the ground that is our porch

you can see

the marks gouged by the famous claws on the wall inside new screen

now laced by a wire trellis on which nothing climbs

a vertical electric fence one of us thinks

the bear can hear it hum from the edge of the woods

watching us like a child sent to his room as we grill the salmon

we spiked with juniper berries the other one thinks

the plural pronoun is a dangerous fiction the source

of so much unexpected loneliness

CHAMELEON

beside myself in Texas the doctors asking my beloved

to give his pain a number one to ten his answer is always

two I tell them eight the holly bush in the yard is putting out new leaves

which makes its resident lizard bright green also light brown

along its slender spine a plausible twig

except the lining of its mouth is red as it puts away

in three quick bites some kind of fly and then at its throat

a rosy translucent sac swells and subsides maybe peristaltic

pushing its meal forward or maybe preening for a mate or maybe

residual from the blooming hibiscus shrub or maybe learned from frogs

that also live in a tree but singing is dangerous if you mean

to replicate vegetation

O exquisite creature

whose dull cousin back in Vermont the brown lizard

navigates our dooryard by alternating pairs of elbows like oars

determined and clumsy moving across the gravel yet moving forward

I see you do not move unless you need to eat you almost fool

the mockingbird nearby in a live oak tree flinging out another’s song

which is me which which is me

LAMENT

absence neither sweet nor bitter

without the aftertaste of willfulness does it happen

as the dipper fixed in the northern sky turns