frost, or if it flowers late because of a too-warm winter,

what debt am I owed? At whose feet should I lay

disappointment? Delight no more comforting

nor wounding than hunger. The tree traffics

in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues

lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes

are left to rot upon the pavement. Is this the only religion

left to us? Not one only of mortification or desire,

not one of suffering, succor, not even of pleasure.

The juice of summer coils in the cells. It is a faith

that may not come to more than waiting.

To insist on pleasure alone is a mark

of childishness. To believe only in denial

the fool’s prerogative. You hunger

because you hunger. And the tree calls to this.

But the fruit is real. I have eaten it. Have plucked

and washed and cut the weight, and stewed it

with sugar and lemon peel until the gold

ran rich and thick into jars. I have spooned it

over bread and meat. I have sucked it

from my husband’s fingers. I have watched it sour

in its pots until a mist of green bubbled up

for a crust. I have gathered and failed it, as the tree

for me both ripens and fallows. But now, it is perhaps

too soon for fruit. The winter this year was hard,

the air full of smokes, and do I know if spring

reached the valley in time? Who planted this tree?

How long has it stood here? How many more years

can such a thing remain? My neighbor reaches a hand

up into the branches, palm cupped, weighing

the leaf knots. She is looking to see

what instincts, what weathers still grow here.

She snakes her hand through the greening branches.

Up from the valley come the golden tongues of bells.

Knitted Thylacin

Knitted Thylacine

Some still claim they are

alive, though the last-known sighting

was in 1930, their skins so rare, London’s

zoology museum has only one

knitted replica for evidence, its fecal blooms

of stripes laddering a tan backside: four-teated,

pouchless; belly a dirt-streaked cream stretched

like a child’s sweater atop a hoop

of willow switches.

You can make one

from a pattern you can buy, knitting

its spotted pelt on size 2 and 4 needles, which are

quite small, circular: you have to slit the shape in two

when finished, the way my grandmother did,

slicing my father’s sweaters

through the sternum, sewing back the deckle edge

of each honeycomb and cable, as the farmers

in Tasmania taught themselves to do, lost

in the colonies of a world no white woman

would enter, and so began

to think like women, sitting before the same fire, knitting

socks and scarves and sweaters

until this work turned from necessity

to art. The first goal with knitting

is utility, and so I’m moved by the strangeness

of these yarn-pelts’

burrs and slubs, the mohair tufts