my uncles my grandfather’s tin of loose tobacco his packet of delicate paper

the deliberate way he rolled and licked and tapped and lit and drew in

and relished it the smell of the wild girls behind the gym the boys

in pickup trucks I sat in my car as the other cars crept by

I looked like a pervert it was perverse

a Lucky under my nose

I drove myself home

I threw away the pack which was unwise the gods

don’t notice whining they notice the brief bright flares of human will

they lean from their couches yes more fear and dread for that one

yes let’s turn the suffering up a notch let’s watch her

strike the match I strike it now when I wake

in the dark I light that little fire

LARCH

short-sleeves in Vermont late November the leaves long gone

only evergreens the white birch bark and our feral black cat

not sheltering prowling improbably in her thickened coat

one more free-range lunch one more of her nine lives

put back into reserve unlike the year’s fresh deaths

as for me I keep my votive candles burning as the larches burned

on the hillside their needles yellow deciduous like the leaves

and now sloughed in the yard beneath the small larch

bent double cascading like a willow weeping is the proper name for it

also for the cherry tree in the yard of the house where my parents’ friend

shot an intruder it was his wife their tree

might as well be here with all my other lost trees childhood mimosas

magnolias the willow oak blown down in a storm surviving in my head

beside the friend the murdered wife the subsequent wife

my parents too and now Peter with his lazy eye and glamorous

doom-ridden Rynn and Carol who had her own reprieves

who used them up I confess the weather matters more and more to me

diurnal is a lovely word another is circadian

ROOF

after a week of daily heavy snow I want to praise my roof first

the acute angle at which it descends from the ridgepole

and second that it is black the color absorbing

all the other colors so that even now as arctic air

blows in from the plains my roof burns off from underneath

the dazzling snow dense layers of particles which are tiny

specks of trash sheathed in wet cloud what chance

do they have against my roof even at night

the snowpack over my head breaks apart and slides on its own melting

down from the eaves as though my roof had shrugged I hear snow

thump to the ground a cleansing sound the secret of my roof

is standing seams the raised ridges

bonding the separate panels to one another an old

wound that has healed no lapped shingles catching the wind

no icejam at the eaves no sending my beloved out with an ax