Read Stag's Leap for Free Online Page B

shales,
    he would make the male soundings, and if I had been
    finishing, I would again, central
    level bubble of a whole note slowly
    bursting. I think he loved being loved,
    I think those were the cadences,
    plagal, of a good, lived life.
    He liked it a long time, tonic,
    dominant, subdominant, and now
    I want to relearn the intervals, to
    journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,
    augmented, diminished, with a light touch,
    sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
    adores and dotes—and of course what I really
    want is some low notes.
    Â Â Â Â The Shore
    And when I was nearing the ocean, for the first
    time since we’d parted—
    approaching that place where the liquid stillborn
    robe pulls along pulverized boulder—
    that month, each year, came back, when we’d swim,
    first thing, then go back to bed, to the kelp-field, our
    green hair pouring into each other’s green
    hair of skull and crux bone. We were like
    a shore, I thought—two elements, touching
    each other, dozing in the faith that we were
    knowing each other, one of us
    maybe a little too much a hunter,
    the other a little too polar of affection,
    polar of summer mysteriousness,
    magnetic in reticent mourning. His first
    mate was a husky pup, who died,
    from the smoke, in a fire. Someone asked him,
    once, to think from the point of view
    of the flames, and his face relaxed, and he said,
    Delicious. I hope he can come to think
    of me like that. The weeks before he left,
    I’d lie on him, as if not heavy,
    for a minute, after the last ferocious
    ends of the world, as if loneliness had come
    overland to its foreshore, breaker,
    shelf, trench, and then had fallen down to where
    it seemed it could not be recovered from. Elements,
    protect him, and those we love, whether we both
    love them or not. Physics, author of our
    death, stand by us. Compass, we are sinking
    down through sea-purse toward eyes on stalks.
    We have always been going back, since birth,
    back toward not being alive. Doing it—
    it
—with him, I felt I shared
    a dignity, an inhuman sweetness
    of his sisters and brothers the iceberg calf,
    the snow ant, the lighthouse rook,
    the albatross, who once it breaks out of the
    shell, and rises, does not set down again.
    Â Â Â Â Poem of Thanks
    Years later, long single,
    I want to turn to his departed back,
    and say, What gifts we had of each other!
    What pleasure—confiding, open-eyed,
    fainting with what we were allowed to stay up
    late doing. And you couldn’t say,
    could you, that the touch you had from me
    was other than the touch of one
    who could love for life—whether we were suited
    or not—for
life,
like a sentence. And now that I
    consider, the touch that I had from you
    became not the touch of the long view, but like the
    tolerant willingness of one
    who is passing through. Colleague of sand
    by moonlight—and by beach noonlight, once,
    and of straw, salt bale in a barn, and mulch
    inside a garden, between the rows—once-
    partner of up against the wall in that tiny
    bathroom with the lock that fluttered like a chrome
    butterfly beside us, hip-height, the familiar
    of our innocence, which was the ignorance
    of what would be asked, what was required,
    thank you for every hour. And I
    accept your thanks, as if it were
    a gift of yours, to give them—let’s part
    equals, as we were in every bed, pure
    equals of the earth.
    Â Â Â Â Left-Wife Bop
    Suddenly, I remember the bar
    of gold my young husband bought
    and buried somewhere near our farmhouse. During our
    divorce—as much ours as any
    Sunday dinner was, or what was
    called the nap which followed it—
    he wanted to go to the house, one last
    time.
Please, not with her,
    please,
and he said,
All right,
and I don’t know
    why, when I figured it out, later,
    that he’d gone to dig up our bar of gold,
    I didn’t mind. I think it is because of how
    even it was, between us, how