and to her relief, he’s happy to oblige.

It’s a clear day, not too hot in the canyon,

and as she touches his shoulder while they walk,

a mild, almost dreamy pleasure begins

to suffuse his face. Strangers,

passing by them, nod. He smiles,

she ducks her head, and they turn a corner,

their slim backs suddenly swallowed

by a stand of ever-blooming crape myrtle.

Rhetoric

RHETORIC

A woman and man are busy beating a tree

that has lost its blossom. The woman and man

have the tree’s bare branches in hand,

they are hitting the tree to revive it, dislodging the few

small birds that have taken up residence, working

to make the lost thing once more beautiful to them.

The birds don’t know: they are strange and useless,

nonsinging bodies. They open their black-ringed throats

like a swarm of coughing orators, and the sound

of their rustling is Cato dragging his silks

over the Forum’s stones. Cato,

who could make an empire go to war,

whose passions became relentless enough

they turned into a project.

Still, how wonderful it must have been

to have listened to him once: the outrage, the force

of that mouth describing the African palace

where a dead queen’s shade still wept

in bed, while the soldier who loved her slipped

into his abandonment, pocketing a necklace of stones

and her palace animals’ teeth.

Did he place this jewelry around his new wife’s neck

in the hope of arousing a similar love?

Or did he bury it in secret, dreaming that the teeth

would turn into armies, plowing their way back

to wall up that forsaken room?

Every failed desire must be accounted for,

Cicero warned. And Cato, recalling

the soldier’s shame, cried, The foreign city must be razed!

All those beautiful animals. They must have been trapped

in the blaze that followed. Skins crisped

or stripped by the Romans eager for a souvenir.

What would the birds, if they could,

say of the couple beating that tree?

They were young, perhaps. The man

wore a hat that looked too small for him.

The woman’s dress had sweat rings around the neck.

They were not inherently cruel, but they were relentless,

and their arms, as they brought the blackened branches down

through the air, made a whistling that at first

sounded just like singing.

Irises

IRISES

How surgical the appetites

that have cleared the deer

to its skeleton I saw lying

in a ring of abandoned

miner’s cabins: hawks

and crows and wild dogs coming

to pick bones clean

among the remnants,

planks of roof and ellipses of iris

where once a garden stood.

The bones laid out like a piece of lace

spread on a table. How carefully

the work was done: the shape

of the deer intact, as if the object

was to make the animal

apparent as possible. Anyone

could have seen it, the form