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star-littered lawn.
    When the porch ivy weaves to me—
    Now is the time.
    Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.
    Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,
    What did she want?
    But it is too late for husbands.
    Their wives do not question
    what it is that dissolves
    all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.
     
    They uncross themselves, forsaking
    all protection. They long to be opened and known
    because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire
    in love with its private ruin.
    I open my hands and they come to me, now.
    In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,
    only followed, only known along the way.
     
    And it is right, oh women of the town, it is right .
    Your mouths, like the seals of important documents
    break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,
    the cracked edges melting to mine.

Unexpected Dangers
    I’m much the worse for wear, it’s double true.
    Too many incidents
    a man might misconstrue—
    my conduct, for a lack of innocence.
     
    I seem to get them crazed or lacking sense
    in the first place.
    Ancient, solid gents
    I sit by on the bus because they’re safe,
     
    get me coming, going, with their canes,
    or what is worse,
    the spreading stains
    across the seat. I recognize at once
     
    just what they’re up to, rustling in their coats.
    There was a priest,
    the calmer sort,
    his cassock flowing down from neck to feet.
     
    We got to talking, and I brushed his knee
    by accident,
    and dutifully,
    he took my hand and put it back
     
    not quite where it belonged; his judgment
    was not that exact.
    I underwent
    a kind of odd conversion from his act.
     
    They do call minds like mine one-track.
    One track is all you need
    to understand
    their loneliness, then bite the hand that feeds
     
    upon you, in a terrible blind grief.

My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead
    Last night, my dreams were full of Otto’s best friends.
    I sat in the kitchen, wiping the heavy silver,
    and listened to the losses, tough custom, and fouled accounts
    of the family bootlegger, county sheriff:
    Rudy J. V. Jacklitch, who sat just beside me,
    wiping his wind-cracked hands
    with lard smeared on a handkerchief.
     
    Our pekinese-poodle went and darkened his best wool trousers,
    and he leapt up, yelling for a knife!
     
    These are the kinds of friends
    I had to tend in those days:
    great, thick men, devouring
    Fleisch, Spaetzle, the very special
    potato salad for which I dice
    onions so fine they are invisible.
     
    Rudy J. V. Jacklitch was a bachelor, but he cared
    for his mother, a small spider of a woman—all fingers.
    She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,
    with a doily. The whole house
    dripped with lace, frosting fell
    from each surface in fantastic shapes.
    When Otto died, old Rudy came by
    with a couple jugs for the mourners’ supper.
    He stayed on past midnight, every night the month after
    he would bring me a little something
    to put the night away.
     
    After a short while I knew his purpose.
    His glance slipped as the evening
    and the strong drink wore on.
    Playing cribbage I always won,
    a sure sign he was distracted.
    I babbled like a talking bird,
    never let him say the words
    I knew were in him.
     
    Then one night he came by,
    already loaded to the gills,
    rifle slung in the back window
    of his truck: Going out
    to shoot toads. He was peeved
    with me. I’d played him all wrong.
    He said his mother knew just what I was.
     
    The next thing I heard that blurred night
    was that Rudy drove his light truck
    through the side of a barn,
    and that among the living
    he stayed long enough
    to pronounce my name, like a curse
    through the rage and foam of his freed blood.
     
    So I was sure, for a time and a time after,
    that Rudy carried
    my name down to hell on his tongue
    like a black coin.
     
    I would wake, in the deepest of places,
    and hear my name called.
    My name like a strange new currency they read:
    Mary Kröger
    with its ring of the authentic
    when