How could she refuse it
on the very verge of spring
when in another hour fury, grief
might ease off enough, allow
quick passage through, climbing down
in say, a cactus garden, angling into light
around adobes where she could
have rented them a room— but
the lost are like this: foster mothers, night
nurses for the lives of others, not their own—
she tore her page out, like the woman who
jumped from the Mayflower before her party
went ashore— the white oak soaked and
fallen,
failed in the same place I now look
She gave her son a wonderful childhood,
as he wrote himself on the last page
of the sympathy book How can we know
the number who have loved us, or how
few—you shall not kill applies
also to the self, though everywhere I meet
discouragements to an inquiring further,
drowsing deep in brief explosive red-flesh
woodlet days—you shall not kill the apples
up from the ground and tasting so good.