A Proper Burial

A Proper Burial:

The Whale. 

for Ginny and her husband Dan

A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture.

Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse.

they grow there with a vengeance.

                                                                                James Galvin

                                                                                The Measure of the Year

The whale settles that very same way: she takes

her last how many gallons of air? and goes down

slow to the waltz.  Blow-hole closed, it's something else

implodes but just so that life around her keeps

going, it kisses her quick as she drifts

and lifts and sinks with the tip of this blue globe.

On the surface somewhere a blizzard sits in the lips  

and fingers of lost children.  On the surface a drought

sits in the ribs of crows bent in famine.  On the surface, somewhere,

the sun is nothing but rising or falling in the nonchalant

lives that go from end of day to end

of day without knowing or thinking to know that something

large like this slips through the veils of bluing

dark, beneath icebergs or kelp beds, beneath

the heave of the crowd rushing the Beatles stage

beneath the last movie craze: all this is happening

beneath their feet: a white crusted lip-sealed living

ship is, finally, going to bottom, open eyed knowing, and on

her side, her right side like my mother was when she died,

falling through every atmosphere there is.  And the weight

of it all iis bearing down, a weight the living can’t feel, unless

the muscles knot, unless the lungs convulse, unless

climbing that mountain, we suck and suck at the thin

air and draw blood instead.  From there it’s not much

different: the whale, the woman, a boot locked into the blue

glaze crust of snow: our ship slips, these bones sewn

in utero,  yesterday or a hundred years ago, sink inside

the hollow of our belly, our cheeks, and, skin finally aside,

we ride while we slide, slip, slide, ride, another kind

of alive.

Rice

Rice

There are countless variations in a life, endless

leaf-strewn paths we might walk to our end,

but what we choose is what we endure.

                                                Angel and Apostle

                                                Deborah Noyes

I never pour a cup of rice but that I gather

each grain that spills out with anxious care--I press

my fingers into it each and am impressed:

it has imbedded  a purpose--which is nothing

other than to grow.  It sits in water

in the lap of blind mercy or grace or just plain

circumstance: of rain of yellow heat of hands

and feet moving through anonymously.  Tend upright

uproot glean…all the way from there to me

it made it to the counter only to tip off the lip

of a steel measuring cup whose handle

is ready to fall off completely.  I can’t stand it.

The water it wants or wants it is boiling its buttered roil.

Each white hard seed is sufficient unto me.  Each

like the 400,000 I’m given in my mother’s blood--

Jesus!  So many!  Maybe I’m too much of myself. 

The thin give of the husked bleached grain.  The grind

of the salt, the beef bones I boiled for the broth.  The finding

each spill and tipping it into the mouth of the waiting

wet furnace--and then the cover-up.  The slow coming

back to simmer on the low heat.  Rice.  Once one

undercover of its mother’s sheaf of green and all

that hard time done, comes to soften after all,

on my tongue one and one and one each unto each

until it is enough to please.  Maybe that’s the peace

I mourn to see, when I see, in the crack of creamy

grout, beside the ivory counter tile, one I’d missed

and it’s waiting for me.  Patient.  Silent.  Nonchalant.

Sits.  Then, indented in the pillow of my thumb.  This one

I eat, hard, starch unyielding as dry pasta, all on

its own.   I think we know one another better like this.  Single.

We know more now than we could have otherwise

for my missing the cup, missing the first and second

and third sweep through.  The passing night.  My blindness.

It’s waiting.

Rescue

Rescue

What then?  To pull you through after all these

years on such a narrow bed that can catch your death

so effortlessly, as though the whole time

its locked wheels are the one

object in the room that waits outside strength

or doesn’t even need it?  Earlier, because there was nothing else

to say or nothing else heard (what with the tubes

through your nose, the anchor against

your cheek to secure your breathing)

I’d imagined your coffin with such ease I spooked

myself.  Yes, it’s come to this.  And so

to beat back the blows the way

day after day you taught me to

and day after day I failed to learn I finally

stood up inside myself and said: I’ll take that

now, I’ll take that stick that belt--or, when it all

came down to muscle, your tongue

pressed to the floor of your chapped and chaffed-

scraped pitiful jaw.  I saw now

the bed and the head in the bed and the fading

buoyancy of your face.  Grey as your driftwood

cane.  Grey as your make-up removal clay.  And

because standing up on the inside means I lean,

almost lying inside you again, into your face, I saw

the way you flicked your eyelids at the close of it all,

and the way (maybe it was relief) you cried

as you died while I threw your tools, your guns

and glass, your thumbed code of crass,

into the furnace of each of our old selves.  I saw you sigh.

I saw you sigh the way that old cow maybe sighed

after my father’s accident maimed him beyond

repair and she, hungry, standing for days and days

unmaintained, at first the balloon of her udder

a curiosity and then, as though she had dropsy,

she cracked and oozed and leaked, she bellowed

alone.  When all she needed was a salve and hands

  

and a soft song the man with the rifle

came instead and the stall was empty after that.

I wonder now, looking at you, after I’d whispered

what I’d whispered into your ear and you cried

if she looked into him the way you looked into me:

a relief just after the flash.  And maybe he prayed for,

if not her end to her suffering, the four kids in the house,

all under ten, playing with their Christmas toys

while the chimney smoked too close to the roof

and the snow fell hard and the people came in and out

like someone, a human this time, had died

and was gone, finally, for good.

At Sixty Nine

At Sixty Nine

She kept her songs, they took so little space

                                                                                Philip Larkin                                       

                                                                                “Love Songs in Age”

Today you would have been sixty

nine.  I break you there

because that’s where you were

when you died.  You’d gotten through

until then though the scythe, if not

your friend, at least your third twin,

swept at your feet like the hem

of crinoline or the pleat of wind

in a dervish skirt.   Always, always your

dying lay quiet at your feet, waiting, 

faithful.

You know, even though I could

spend a good part of my day every day

in dispute with you (though now

especially because the sound

of your voice has never changed

for me), it’s as if nothing else is ever really

still, like records in their slip

cases, how all that sound is

paused and now all we need is speed

and a needle and a couple

of speakers.  Believe me when

I say I don’t think I need to

play a single one.  I’ve kept them

all, I couldn’t turn them out,

and suppose I never would for love

or small bills.  But listen.  Even today

or especially today, the scratch

is still there in the air, the crack of static

settled in the worn grooves

of my temporal lobe.  The needle’s blunt

but there’s another sharper tool on the roof

of your mouth, going cold as you go

cold, losing it the way bowels are lost

in the end, and then how they settle against

the pelvis like the cradle it is

and like the baby you began as sixty

nine years ago.  Listen.  The tension’s

blown out like light, and now not so much

blown out as gone too low, how the way

fuel in the globe coats the tongue of wick

and even as we spoke our least real

words nearly two years before you

died the edges were gone dry, were flying

off and if not flying then drifting

and if not drifting than hovering

like that fire between us in the lamps,

you know, when the power went out

how we heard the hissing, how we’d sit

at the kitchen table, your knitting

the sixth pair of winter mittens, the cuff

alone a miracle to me, how you’d learned

to gather that one string against all four

of those needles and square off

and pull and slip and bore down on us

like a mother who, exhausted of her cubs

come lately into her coveted dark,

would growl or hiss or whisper  

and spin, just spin, in and in you’d spin.

Explaning Rape Culture

Explaining Rape 
Culture

After Philip Levine’s “Desolation”

For you would hardly care

That you were less deceived, out on that bed,

Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair

To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic.

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Desolation

This last stanza after an epigraph of an account

by a ruined woman who wakes up concussed from drug

I want to catch you off

guard I want to feel if you really mean the man’s desolate

after he rapes the girl and is forever after a waste

or if he was already desolate and waited

for her with his syringes and pills and bottle of booze?

I tell you, I didn’t need any of that--all I needed

was a mother who wrapped marriage up in two silk words:

I DO.

It was duty and I took it from there.  I thought nothing

but laying it all down no matter what where why

into the (let me quote you) unanswerable light, tall and wide.

Let me say too that shame begins a long time before

the beds, a long time carding the shorn wool before the garment,

forbidding as it is, is worn.

I guess, yes, I get that.

I guess I can put that on

like a thick skin in August

but what I’m saying is the line’s crossed

when the fuck who fucks you without you there

(listen you’re there, but you leave, you know?)

without your hands and feet

without your teeth

is excused is curtsied to is Nose to the Toe examination afterward

come in the back door

and he’ll make it all ok again.  I ain’t buying that.

And don’t tell me he’s a damaged little boy

inside the biceps and calves of a man

who’ll hold me

down and swallow my nononono

like it’s vintage

like its his first time

like his ass has never been grabbed

by a guy like him

man I want to understand this:

               

                why I have to, twenty years on

                get out

                of bed

                wiping this shit

                up

                out of my head

and he’s pushing himself into a new pair of boots

and a new wife.  I’m saying this: 

Don't make excuses.  I’ll take it if you don’t take his

desolation as more costly on his soul as mine: ---

Yes, like you say: my mind does lay open
like a drawer of knives.  I'm willing to say I've taken it
out of context, but not today.  Maybe in another twenty
years.  How else???

Despair

Despair

A friend and I

talked back then about a tree

whose branches were the choices that we

had not taken

then she chose not to be

                                        W. S. Merwin

                                        Choosing
for M. W.

The time you finally arrive and think:

after all these miles--miles and miles and miles

I will never laugh again or grin

or have the urge or the need to.

Broached and cold after the broaching

the slow flow unbunged when will it be  

enough to sit with your face in your hands

and soothe each cheek and bone, each eye

lid and socket each and every hair and lash

each line beside each line and every line  

a sheet of music and a meistro all in one ear

in the dark that you are now and feel

stumped under the palms of your thumbs
and fingers finding the jaw's a wadded
ball say and then to lift it with practice lift it

tooth and nail and set with lips drawn in

lift it inch by inch until it can be unhinged

again open-tongued and smoothed a laid out

path on your now ancient back that's a map
on whose skin you've born the way

and taken to the trees or the sea and the dark is all we have

in common.  This paper's been through the mill,

this paper, once of a ream, once all goo and glue,

once one of a tree among trees.  It does

not cannot recall the one true palm upon it

who meant no harm.  But there was one--

and long like a mother’s hand

on her son’s intubated lung

after the cutting in and cutting out

the arrival and exit of air between

gurgling all this life unwadded and set

flat again and sealed and bared and hovered

and a drop of ink to set the first note

in 4/3 time

or 4/4

or whatever we can unskilled make
make at the moment to be heard or more, felt

under the face under the hands, under the lips

unfurling in time once it’s all sung
in notes and drawn on the stave

and gripped and hanged

on four strings

against the cheek and called out

by wrist and bow 

and played

Alarm

When a Wolf

When a Coat, Opening

'Twas a Divine Insanity--

The Danger to be sane

                                  Emily Dickinson

                a bell

                a horn

                a rattle

                a whine

                a pause

a

                                                silence

                        an inhale                                                                         

an exhale

a phone

                ringing

a phone

                not

the skin of smooth bath water

the without a single cloud sky

the after the other hand let go empty hand

the wordless tongue

the floor of piss wet rug the undone by the foot of the tub mother

the phone again

the mouse and cat of a fussy baby

the putting him down

the finally picking up my father’s undone four hundred miles away voice

it’s early in the morning

it’s November

it’s a familiar call that's been called a lot

it’s a reserved (maybe stalled) shock

yes please come home

this time

yes please come alone

this time

no she is not here

this time

no she won’t make it

this time

Nine Years On, Or Nearly So

Nine Years On, Or Nearly So

All your life you’d made your threats,

then hedged the bets as they say, then called

and somewhat bluffed your way

day and day and day through

the years I knew you in a tranquil-

ized haze.  Having played

every card, more than three-quarters

lost and gone, all those queens

and kings you’d stood in knee-deep

in the trenches for to ante up

with deuces…

tired isn’t how it’d come to be that way.

I have to say, sober you were bold

to go all the way in until you played away

your whole life, even the low cards, fuck

if you couldn’t bluff! Aces and eights

were your favorite hand

and every time, every time! you’d clean

up and try to cash in the chips all

at once and I stashed some

so you’d have it to fall

back on and you’d be on a carousel

of winning for a while and I’d leave you

be left by you and I let you be

when I grew up and took it in the chin

your upper-cut from the hip

when they called, when my son turned

three (you’d sworn off booze)

and all that winning went down

your throat and you broke open

on the bathroom floor…

Tell me: who can gamble, I mean let’s be

honest here, who can gamble

any other way than close to the bone

when the show’s really about

to close and the toilet’s over-

flowed and the cards are sticking

to the shit and piss

of your tired untamable life and the kids

the kids all us four

come one by one to your bed

and kiss your sunk cheek and say good

bye and high

tail it home or out of our mind

but one last time I stay

I stay I stay the whole length

of the night.  Through all the gurgle

you fold you fold your old stroke-

curled hand open as much

as it can be, pinched pills a ghost

in your throat, your deck scattered still

scattering by the cold late incoming wind

Before Winter, and Then...

Before Winter, and Then...

…it seemed to me that there need not be

relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento,

bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace,

if only the darkness could be perfect

and permanent. 

                                  Marilynne Robinson

                                                Housekeeping

This is the way it works for her:

first the seed and then the sowing of the seed:

                the split husk and then the shove

                up through peat  (or vermiculite

                if it’s rumored to come on dry)

                and the vines reach sky-

                ward if they’ve been given a climb

                or scutt among the turned up

                stones and last year’s fish bones

                and if they've been trained to lean
                against the pole--

               

                and up they go and out no matter the press

                of the sky or choke of the root. 

And she’s among them every day, a nurse between

the beds, an ear for each new plume

                and a pocket notebook to keep it

                and a sharp pencil to mark all the agree

                or disagreements.  And once summer

                has wrung out it’s wardrobe on the neck

                of everyone, what’s got plump or even not

                with blush or glow will come undone

                like pins in the bun at the base of her

                scapula after the dance: it’s all kept

                tense until that first finger then two up

                through into the dark to loose the teased

               

security and one by one the locks fall…it’s like this:

come early or late, Autumn is the rush of it

                all: the plums and wheelbarrows

    in another country are her apples

    and bushel baskets and ladders she’ll climb

    into, a canopy of finding and each to her cheek

    she’ll ease into a linen bag and to descend

    two rungs at a time and walk a mile and a mile

    and a mile in her kitchen between sink

    and knife and paring, pot and water

and simmering to put it all up.  It makes me

wonder:

                under the surface of a winter lake, when in spring

                the green is its own mud brown beneath, and through

                the next three seasonS the surface can only show

                the sky the high track of everything passing by

                while the bottom settles it once and for all, a thick

                grip only it can need come winter because all its top-

                side green is decay, so to save it the lake, from the edges

                in, begins its own slow closing, a cold cold colder still

                than closing until the whole surface is snow and what’s frozen

                beneath it, and I imagine, it’s here that I see how a soul

                floats in a body without getting completely free. 

                It’s like a season of three: the growing up and out

                of the dark the climb and creep, the reach of a hand

                and then to save it all from that decay the madness of

                                sugar

                salt

                                vinegar

                pickle

               

                all ladled after their grate and slice their marriage

                into the glass row of winter infantry and the boil

                to seal them shut to cap them and seal them, their

                briny life stilled in their light.  Isn’t it like this

                in the winter lake?  Isn’t it like this in the living

                body?  Something of irreplaceable value sealed

                shut?  And shelf after shelf of labor to see?  And freezing

                February morning, the reach for it, the tap

                on the seal, to see it stayed, and then, decision made,

                the sweet under the rubber pry, the ssssssspt!

                Free!

Loyalty

Loyalty

Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath,

                                                                …falls again

Willingly, lastly, forknowledgeably deep

Into the hay-floor that gave once in his childhood

Down through the bedded mouth of the loft trapdoor,

The loosening fodder-chute, the aftermath…

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                “The Loose Box”

I don’t say anything about you other than

you were tall: 6’7”.  And you had that flatter

than most babies face my Aunt Clara would say

was whiskey sweet.  And you packed sardines

with acute ferocity, weaving each headless fish

into their can like some grass and ash basket

a cousin tried to teach you to make.  You spoke

as though you were born with a marble

in your mouth and it clicked against your palate

and words sometimes competed to get out, like kids

at the school recess bell and the bottle neck

of bodies pushing through the double doors

into mid-January’s false thaw.  I saw you

day after day a boy before you were a man

my grandmother’s cousin’s grandson and we played

in haunted attics and under skewered alder

branches and swam in that Bay of Fundy

and you taught me to hold my breath and held me

floating the way the salt in the water never could. 

I saw you day after day before you were a man. 

Day after day.  And then I didn’t.  Maybe once.  In

your father’s restaurant.  A bus-boy rushing by

shy, another person all those years later.  Stained

apron.  Glassy eyes.  Dirty dishpan.  I’d heard

you were in and out of city shelters.  You smiled. 

Same smile.  You went into the banging kitchen

and I never saw you again.  When I heard you’d been

murdered for putting your hand on a boy’s knee

in a public park I put my face in my hands and felt you

against my ribs in that salt water, your hands

under the small of my back, holding me up to the sun.

You never let go, even after I touched bottom.  I read

that the man who killed you was a stranger a vagrant

a booze-hound from South Dakota just passing

through who’d thumbed his way all the way to Maine

and this fate: five gallons of gasoline and a dug-out

under a bridge.  One match.  By the time you were found

you were smoke and bone and nothing but

a cast off shoe and a winter coat and a business

card with the hours of your AA meetings, your sponsor’s

number smudged by the snow.

Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

For the Ones Who Claim Jesus But Scream “Barabbas! Give Us Barabbas!”

Planet earth like a teething ring suspended

Hangs by its world-chain.  Your pram waits in the corner.

Cows are let out.  They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                Bann Valley Eclogue

Tell me stories are borne another way and I’ll tell you

you never labored one day in your entire life.  Never

a shovel or a belching cow.  Never a bucket at your boot

filled with snow before you even make it to the barn.  Shit.

You’re only lips and tongue and a thin alley throat.  A street

corner at night to five a.m. whoring your lie for a pack

of smokes and a clumsy stroke.  A plucked game bird. 

A tabloid cryer.  A pew-stainer.  Gasoline in your gills

when good men walk out and past you and sigh at what

you might have been.  You hack and cry and light yourself

on fire you ride their coat-tails and when you arrive

you wrap yourself around them like a contamination vest.

You try to snuff them out.  You reach into their jeans

and squeeze.  Jesus you seem sweet, the way, before all this

you’d sneak peaks at the grocery store, at the man

and his wife and their happy life and you’d almost

shit yourself wanting it.  You’d swallow gobstoppers

and near to choke yourself to see him rescue you.  You go down

to the cold linoleum and open your shirt and spill your privacy

into the isle with you and let the tantrum you’ve given birth to

run wild pulling everything off the shelf, every can of soup

every bar of soap every block of cheese every banana ripped

out of its bunch every bottle of top shelf merlot and loaf

of bread and quart of milk the whole store’s strewn

with you.  Your loose untamable Satan.  How did you make it

this far?  Whose clothes hid your growing belly?  The story?

It’s back at the corner of the house.  While you, and in the blizzard

waiting, stake a claim on surveyed land, while you, unbooted

and barehanded open the door to make your path to the barn

the snow you never prepared for falls and falls and falls. 

It belongs to no one, even after landing.  Wind’s still gusting.

Goading you.  Up by the side of the barn the drift’s hitting the roof.

You break through the crust with the wrong socks on.  Fuck

if you know how to live a story.  You can’t even lift your foot half-way

into the yard.  

Who Knew New Grass

Who Knew New Grass?

When impact is

                instant when it is

                in the bone like a post hole digger

                raised high as the sky

                of wrists and torso

                to come down into it all

                at one precious point

                and the surface is pierced

                and the soil is suffered

                separated falling into the jaws

                to be lifted out and sent

                sod side up

                to its new uprooted thirst

                                

The first time

                you touch a girl it’s this

                hydraulic rift from shoulder

                to elbow to wrist to finger-

                tip

                in the cautious but not

                hot air it’s up

                and not meant to hover

                under the weight

                and the burning is loud

                as a basement draft

                pulled up the wall by only opening

                the door who knew

                in the box of old books

                beside the furnace a careless

                flint is ricocheted

                off the old tool he’d used years ago

                to set the boundaries

                rust thin now and dormant

               

                who knew touching

                who knew raising

                who knew new grass

                who knew he slow slow

                                then quick coming down

                                and the blades buried        

                                unseen

                                cracking

                                on impact 

Fall Sweater

Fall Sweater

Dry clean or hand wash

use warm water

do not rub wring spin or bleach

dry flat

warm iron

Particular to the garment and fiber:

cotton or wool or silk, on a tag

at the back of the neck--for the sweater

from Carraig Donn--and maybe

because it took to the earth

in a different way, was plucked

and chewed and ruminated, was first

sod, yes, like cotton, was spit, yes, like

silk, but when the black belly, when

the catacombs of viscera, when

the squeeze and the sheer weight

of its final removal, a whole

coat or two maybe in this case, a

cream colored sweater so much at home

the way it’s worn and so thoroughly

warm, it belongs

on my skin the way it belonged

on the sheep’s skin.   Is it blasphemous

to want it in cotton?  Because

honestly the itch is more than I can take.

I’ve gotten used to the weight but I know

I know I’ll never wear it bare.  But I want to!

And caring to starts with taking it

down at the start of the fall--

lacking all the ceremony of how it should be

stored to prevent the lips of moths…but God!

it’s on my mind now and needs cleaning

like the days remaining before you died

how you could never get, to your liking,

clean enough or warm enough, how cotton

was not enough and for sure not silk,

and I had this sweater for you, even though

it’s heavy and itchy, and I pulled it

up to your chin like I were tucking you in

for the night and look down at you in a moon

or the glow from the open door

and see it fuse into you it’s animal self

and you’d cough a little and spit and that’s

the small stain on the back of the collar,

just above the cleaning instructions

and for all the while you wore it I left it

there and now, now that you’ve died

and are buried my only like to you is this bile

stain and how absolutely at home it is there

how it took to the wool the way grain

takes to oak.  What you’ve pulled up out of you.

What grew from you.  What was cut

and spun.  What was knit then spit

to keep me warm.

What If, All Along, You’ve Been Hating the Wrong Man

What If, All Along, You’ve Been Hating the Wrong Man

There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.

                                                                                    Home

                                                                                    Marilynne Robinson

What if you’re hating the wrong man?

What if Jesus, the Jesus you know is the God

            your father knew and you hate them both

            because they are the same
            paradox?

What if the Jesus you heard in church is the Jesus

            your brother cups in his hands, priest’s oysters

            he’ll call them later because clutch is money

            and he'll be ok until he’s twenty and is told

            to be ashamed but it takes a while, a long while

            because it all tasted so good and still does

            even though there are no other men now.

What if it didn’t start with a priest, maybe it never was

            a priest, maybe it was just discovery discovery

            as though all along it had been waiting on nothing

            special but came as a simple light a thin sliver

            picked out of the bare foot that makes a man

            stop and pause and pull it away and walk on

but not before he looks up not before he sees a shape

            lift itself up a man among men who desires

            who is gentle who will love him who has been

            waiting to love him but neither knew it and won’t

            know it until the stone until the dark until the priest

            until the brother after you refused the job

all those years ago who sent your beloved charge instead

            and never not really how could he after all that

            forgive you?

            

After Extubation

After Extubation

But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released

and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills…

                                                                                                                                Homecoming

                                                                                                                                Marilynne Robinson

I’ve known all along her accumulation of used

and tired things was a staving off of all

the used and tired things she’d thought

she’d left behind forever but were really dragged

in a sack that never lacked for holes and yet

performed miracle after miracle  by nothing ever

being kicked or elbowed or pushed out or through

for space or love or neglect.  In deed, her sorrow was this

sack she dared and mended when the dark closed in

and she needed it’s ironic space.  It was like the space

a baby makes between the wall of the uterus

and the placenta, a constant relying but never

throughout all those rapid  heartbeats living like

it could all end the moment it prolapses

and all the lights and sounds, like the abrupt

shutting down at carnival are suddenly stuffed

into a hole and closed, just closed, forever.  I suppose

she gathered her sorrows that way, her whole life

dragging.  And the day she opened it the creatures

all her stuff had become at first wouldn’t move.  Couldn't.

They were by now something else entirely

and the light hurt them enough to shrink them.  

Still, they knew her by her smell and recovered

enough when she reached in to bite her but only

out of being cold, because the space was small,

and as she pulled away the blanket of her life

got large and she waited and watched as it drifted

up on a wind and all of it, every small legged thing,

nosed in her lap like puppies just born, wet and eyeless,
and soon throughout the days of intubation, a knee was gained

and soon an ankle, as they made their way out, off

into the wide wide furiously wide free dying.