Consider, T. H.

How the placement of the napkin turns the half-eaten meal into trash. How the addition of metal to a hand makes a woman wife.

Every day I struggle into it—language—too tight muslin while I haul the bulk of desk & carcass & roof on my back between this country and the next one.

With the right canopy & basement, a family home becomes a funeral home and the child picks daisies not for the bedroom tables but for a corpse made rubber or made clay.

Later in the day I dawdle with Shakespeare while churning butter, I diddle Keats swishing the laundry, I proselytize to the raisin globes.

Wildness may not be the only virtue but does nicely in a pinch.

How your paper so reverently turned in the drawing rooms of millions becomes bed for the bowery bum, the child’s war-hat.

(At night I imagine you in your study, high chair backed in leather, wells of ink replenished by your wife or servant, your journals lining your coat pockets.)

I wake to the church throne of a bird’s cry or my mother’s moan or how I imagine your voice against my ear.

(When was a woman ever sufficiently serious about serious matters? and in verse? This should be taken up at length by some-one sufficiently trained in the matter to elucidate the condition.)

If you come I will give you my recipe for cake and we can walk between the rows of sheets hung over the lines flapping. My hands warm in your pockets.

Imagine me spending the day casting my mind out on a hook

{dark iris, un-snuffed flame, eclipse}

to you and reeling in a circumference that looks like a curled domestic cat, a yarnball, at best, a lantern with tarnished glass; Consider,

that a dandelion in a meadow, wild, is a flower; a dandelion, wild, in a garden is a weed.

I miss your green gloves, I miss your letters.