With my dog they called it sleep,
but it was death that came as I held her
with strokes and promises of peace
murmuring through us chest to chest,
her eyes and ears hard and sealed with age.

Only scent remained. Did she smell love?
Betrayal? Did her nose warn of the sudden stab
of the chemical dagger? Did she remember
the hundred harpoons a cornered porcupine launched
when she was a pup or the definite nip
of the woodchuck who stole a piece of snout?

And then her head fell. I killed her.
For sleep brings a different kind of waking.

It fell like a leaf from a tree at year’s end,
faded and crisp, a photo drifting to the floor.
She was there, thirty years before, wheat jeans,
chambray shirt, straw colored hair spun to gold.
Who sees me now? Invisible to the eyes of the glorious young,
a nimbus of white wreathing an old man's face, desire
untrammelled by age. She threaded my heart, embroidered me,
sewed patchwork into a life. Cradling children snuggled between,
we rocked ourselves to sleep each night, dreaming a wish
to throttle time.

Spring sulked this year,
plants wet and swollen shut,
buds reined in
by the season’s late debut,
all drenched by loss.

But life, spirited away in mourning,
cannot remain shut up.

Fingers of grief, deft as hungry lovers,
pry open.
Wet sheets snap in the drying wind.
Trash cans
plundered by dogs
boom across winter worn grass
ironed by sun, spilling
corks, stained red
with last night’s wine,
alive,
sulfurous.

The sharp rains of sorrow cut
through me into places left long
vacant by tears until I,
worn from wearing masks,
in company of shadows,
refuse to bury coals
to keep the blaze
from burning.

Eyes travel from canvas to porcelain, flowers
arranged with care, catching the right tone,
her brush flicks.

A squall bruises the cerulean sky.
Welts of indigo rise. The room flares
white, light divorced from shadow.
Her palette hot, each smear of paint burning.

The doorway, lintel near kindling, frames
Emily, fourteen, feline, grace and arrogance,
her beauty a warning almost too painful to bear.
The girl’s ******* her mother’s own before they fell
with time and weight and nursing.
Emily child skin sloughed off, flesh ripe, glistening.

Old words drop on mother’s tongue, “I could eat you up
(as you ate me).” Images in the painter mind
of porous *******, Emily’s rooting lips, shirts, blouses
marked with nursing and her own early nights,
reveries of a man and, by him, a baby.

(But the man never ravished her as the child did.  His anger
burned sienna between sheets and walls
for months as she kneaded pleasure from the rising swell
beneath her belly until muddied by blues, sullen
he left.)

“How was school today?” mother asks warily, resentful
to be so. The daughter turns to head below
and slit-mouthed breaths, “Fine.” The word
a jagged line across her mother’s work, cut roses,
carnations, mums, a Delft tureen. Brushstrokes writhe,
clench into figures---mother, father, Emily---and vanish
as laughter, a tease of easy joy no longer shared,
rolls upstairs. Mother’s hand, the brush
too tightly grasped, shakes and spirits spill.
She sits in bathroom quiet, tissues wet with salted tears.
Feet scuffle from down to up, a knock opens the door.
“Mom, take me to the drugstore. I need
some stuff!”

The painting day a ruin. “Only if you want do you need.”
“At least I use them,” from Emily, crimson flush
to her soft defiant cheek. She turns, but
mother’s hand to keep her youth from going grabs her skirt.
It rips. Emily’s nails rake her mother’s face
who, hand to cheek, is amazed to find palms stained with alizarin blood.

In fearful flight from what she’s done, Emily raises a tube
fat with madder rose and holds
the canvas hostage. Colored snakes inch out. Emily
and her mother now striped reds with blood and paint,
souls soaked through,
thick with love. The tall grass outside steams.

His breath shimmered like the small quick fish
he grabbed and let go among the tall grasses
of the childhood pond when he saw her, lustrous,
bright, haloed despite the dark of the quarry.
He ran without care, but she cared not to be caught.
Her getaway left him wanting
to seal up the too wild river of his heart.

She a translator, he a spy,
she revealing a page of text and meaning,
he unlocking the perfect code, one half
needing the other without knowing
a single foreign phrase, selves fitting together in
a fragile nested shell, making one world for two.

In her god wrought cave, she wept. She saw
only a stilted heron, perfect, patient, dagger sharp bill
alert to pierce a tremor in still water. Fearful, her breath
barely held with sight of his leaf twined leg
as she broke the surface to touch his beauty. She howled,
a breeze feathered his cheek.

I flashed invitations,
visited, and left
only a stain (at most)
on the body (at least)
of those who let me enter.

Then one day she came (the one I love)
and lay me down
(she was promise, she was spring)
and let me find (I cannot forget)
beneath her jeans (I cannot forget)
her tendrilled mound
of strawberry blonde
that tasted
and tastes of heaven.

And when I left (I was cold, I was winter)
she would not let me go,
but led me in
to her soft and rooted soul
that I might have
my own to give.

“I killed my son,” he said, fielding the catch in his voice,
words plain, unwreathed with plea or pardon.
“They say it was an accident, but I swerved the sled
that hit the tree that slammed the skull
that bruised his brain and knocked the life
right out of him. I heard it slip away. Twice.
I couldn’t get a handle on something so fluttery,
went right past me real slow, but too quick
just the same. Air, they told me, is what it was,
escapes from the lungs when the brain is only matter.

“Ten years old, curled up, a question mark on an envelope of snow.
Death arrived and I, to him no more than a mitten or a cap,
barely breathed as any creature does when danger seems close,
a lunge or swipe away. He stood, his face beneath a mask,
or so I thought, although I’d seen neither.

“And then one night he came again, I knew, for me.
Hours I waited in horror, to see what look he had
or what he buried. The hardest work I’ve ever done,
to will my eyelids up, to see--not night, not death,
but light and love and morning.”

In the black coffee of night the moon pours cream
through the open window above our bed and lightens
the umber shadow stretching across the pale linen wall.
I want to paint you, your skin canvas smooth. Your breath
teases my touch as the hands and lips of new lovers do.
I dip my brushes into the liquid cups of your palms, load them
with color--madder rose,
vermillion,
scarlet,
carmine deep, cerulean,
turquoise,
lemon yellow,
burnt sienna,
ebony, titanium white--
to mix and match memories. I trace the whorls of your ears.
One brush fine enough to limn each lash, another of sturdy
bristle to scumble in the nooks of belly and ribs. I use flats
and ovals to define the arcs of your curves and wipe them clean
with rags torn from sheets where we strayed. Carefully, I frame you
in my arms and dry you with whispers.