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crackly
    rustle and the feathery grease remind me that
    what I am doing is what my then husband
    did, that sitting waltz with the paper,
    undressing its layers, blowsing it,
    opening and closing its delicate bellows,
    folding till only a single column is un-
    taken in, a bone of print then
    gnawed from the top down, until
    the layers of the paper-wasp nest lay around him by the
    couch in a greyish speckle dishevel. I left him to it,
    the closest I wanted to get to the news was to
    start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was
    reading, the clouds of printed words
    gradually becoming bedsheets around us.
    When he left me, I thought,
If only I had read
    the paper,
and vowed,
In two years,
    I will have the Times delivered,
so here
    I am, leaning back on the couch, in the smell of ink’s
    oil, its molecules like chipped bits of
    ammonites suspended in shale,
    lead’s dust silvering me.
    I have a finger, now, in the pie—
    count me as a reader of the earth’s gossip.
    I weep to feel how I love to be like
    my guy. I taste what he tastes each morning
    without moving my lips.
    Â Â Â Â Maritime
    Some mornings, the hem of the forewash had been almost
    golden, alaskas and berings of foam
    pulled along the tensile casing.
    Often the surface was a ship’s grey,
    a destroyer’s, flecks of sun, jellies,
    sea stars, blood stars, men and women of war,
    weed Venus hair. A month a year,
    for thirty years. Nine hundred mornings,
    sometimes we could tell, from the beach,
    while taking our clothes off, how cold the water
    was, by looking at it—and then,
    at its icy touch, the nipples took
    their barnacle glitter, underwater
    a soft frigor bathed the sex as if
    drawing her detailed outline in the seeing
    brain, and he braced his knees in the press
    of the swell, and I dove under, and near the
    floor of this life I glided between his ankles, not
    knowing, until he was behind me, if I had got
    through without brushing him. Then,
    the getting out, rising, half-poached
    egg coming up out of its shell and membrane,
    weight of the breasts finding their float-point
    on the air, soppy earths, all this
    in the then beloved’s gaze,
    the ball in the socket at the top of his thighbone
    like a marrow eye through which the foreshore could have
    seen us, his hip joints like the gravital centers
    of my spirit. Then we’d lie, feet toward the Atlantic,
    my hypothermic claw tucked
    beneath the heat of his flank, under
    day moon, or coming storm,
    swallow, heron, prism-bow, drizzle,
    osprey, test-pilot out to No Man’s.
    And then, before our sight, the half world
    folded on itself, and bent, and swallowed,
    and opened, again, its wet, long
    mouths, and drank itself.
    Â Â Â Â Slowly He Starts
    And slowly he starts to seem more far
    away, he seems to waft, drift
    at a distance, once-husband in his grey suit
    with the shimmer to its weave—his hands at his sides,
    as if on damselfly wings he seems
    to be borne through the air past my window. And a breeze
    takes him, up and about, he is like
    a Chagall bridegroom, without the faith-
    fulness, or with a faithfulness which can
    change brides once, he is carried, on a current,
    like a creature of a slightly other species,
    speech unwoken, in him, as yet,
    and without the weight to hold him to
    the ground. Silent meteor,
    summer shower of perseids,
    he is floated here and there so dim and
    quiet he is like a sleeper, with large,
    heavy-lidded, calm eyes
    open. I am glad not to have lost him
    entirely, but to see him moved
    at the whim of the sky, like a man in the wind,
    drawn as if on a barge resting on
    updrafts, mild downdrops, he is like
    an icon, he is like a fantasy.
    I did not know him, I knew my idea
    of him. The first years alone,
    they said I would get over him
    sometime soon, and the skin of my heart
    seemed to be lying along the skin
    of some naked heart. But now the invisible
    streams show themselves, in their motions
    of him, in the low