Our babysitter lives across from the Dodge Street cemetery,

And behind her broad, untroubled face.

Her sons play touch football all afternoon

Among the graves of clerks & Norwegian settlers.

At night, these huge trees, rooted in such quiet,

Arch over the tombstones as if in exultation,

As if they inhaled starlight.

Their limbs reach

Toward each other & their roots must touch the dead.

When I was fifteen,

There was a girl who loved me; whom I did not love, & she

Died, that year, of spinal meningitis. By then she

Had already left home, & was working in a carnival—

One of those booths where you are supposed

To toss a dime onto a small dish. Finally,

In Laredo, Texas, someone anonymous, & too late, bought her

A bus ticket back….

Her father, a gambler & horse dealer, wept

Openly the day she was buried. I remember looking off

In embarrassment at the woods behind his house.

The woods were gray, vagrant, the color of smoke

Or sky. I remember thinking then that

If I had loved her, or even slept with her once,

She might still be alive.

And if, instead, we had gone away together

On two bay horses that farted when they began to gallop,

And if, later, we had let them

Graze at their leisure on the small tufts of spring grass

In those woods, & if the disintegrating print of the ferns

Had been a lullaby there against the dry stones & the trunks

Of fallen trees, then maybe nothing would have happened….

There are times, hiking with my wife past

Abandoned orchards of freckled apples & patches of sunlight

In New Hampshire, or holding her closely against me at night

Until she sleeps, when nothing else matters, when

The trees shine without meaning more than they are, in moonlight,

And when it seems possible to disappear wholly into someone

Else, as into a wish on a birthday, the candles trembling…

Maybe nothing would have happened, but I heard that

Her father died, a year later, in a Sierra lumber camp.

He had been drinking steadily all week,

And was dealing cards

When the muscle of his own heart

Kicked him back into his chair so hard its wood snapped.

He must have thought there was something

Suddenly very young inside his body,

If he had time to think….

And if death is an adolescent, closing his eyes to the music

On the radio of that passing car,

I think he does not know his own strength.

If I stand here long enough in this stillness I can feel

His silence involve, somehow, the silence of these trees,

The sky, the little squawking toy my son lost

When it slipped into the river today….

Today, I am thirty-four years old. I know

That horse dealer with a limp loved his plain, & crazy daughter.

I know, also, that it did no good.

Soon, the snows will come again & cover that place

Where he sat at a wobbling card table underneath