Winter Amnesties

First Earth

30 First Earth Her tongue took him quick as a toad’s: toad, A brooding bag of leaps whose name came late to him, And only after hearing unrelieved for days Her sullen theories and complaints. What did she settle to, those afternoons The beasts sprang easily to his lips, and he spoke The swagger of broad haunches, backwash of fins, Those loose broods sweeping through the trees? And in that hour when the winds back up And stars withdraw beyond the mind, when he Would smooth his bed down beside her, asleep In their bower of bindweed and spiked rose, What was she dreaming then? And why, In the slow lusters of the dawn, did she seem A breathing shadow, a sway of dry slopes Undivided from the earth? He knew only How much inside he’d given up to her: Something halfbent beneath her breasts, Their centers round and ripe as the fruit She’d picked for him, polished in her hands— A world still warm from the making. ...