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Sunset Hill

The birds are still negotiating, defending their territory,
or just playing with sound and breath. From where I walk

it all sounds like beauty. Plenty of light even now in the open.
Fireflies in the trees. The labyrinth is empty, as it usually is.

K. confessed at dinner that she lost patience and walked
straight out, and I laughed because I did too, the day before.

I made all the turns but found them tedious. I put a few
stray stones back in line. Swallows looped over the grass.

Atonement

We’ve paid too little. The winds have died down
as we had begged for;            our sore knee is be-
having nicely; it will not throb.              Atone-
ment, seemingly endless, has passed.       Are we

being lambed, through winter, for an irre-
levant price?          One bleat, over a hundred;

The comedy of table

Old Abram at the oaks of Mamre
squints into the noonday sun
and bids the travelers welcome.
Bread and a tender calf, and then
the promise of the impossible,
Sarah laughing in the kitchen.

                        *

After the baskets of bread crumbs
and fish bones, after the wounds
and the burial, the intimate supper
at Emmaus, his hands glowing

                        *

Flannery’s donkey

“Ernest did the honors for the burros this Christmas pageant. He did all
right at the Methodist dress rehearsal but when the big moment came and
the church full of Methodists, he wouldn’t put his foot inside the door.”

                                            —Flannery O’Connor

 

Peter at eighty

Peter rides his bike into the morning.
Today he flies through the forest
early enough for the deer to emerge,
watching him and thinking how odd a being
wears cloth over pale skin, and a helmet,
who sits atop wheels that propel him
into their shaded space.

The doe stops to look at his freckled arms
before rustling back into the trees.
The crunch of twigs as she bounds away,
her hooves a polished weight, echo.

God as the mother fox and her three kits, Apostle Islands, Wisconsin

Time for them is only light through their eyelids.
Before they fully awake
they are chasing across the lawn of the inn.
It’s 5:30 a.m.
We hear their fur
against our grass-level window glass.
They brush against our lives.

The mother has placed dead moles like Easter eggs
around the grass, and they practice hunting,
flinging gray bodies like toys, nosing
them into the air. Death is play.
Extravagant, the mother’s tail is like the collars of coats
she has no knowledge of.

Requiescat in pesto

Needed: a ritual for clipping the last basil
for the last batch of pesto
for inhaling that final blast of slower days
as the blender grinds
like last rites for the summer

here in the middle of September
something to comfort us
amid this rigid schedule
and the last ripe tomato
lingering on the windowsill

something to remind us
all this homework will come to an end

Selvedge

We hear so much about the healing, but I want to know
about after the miracle, when everyone else has gone home.
The shape of the blankets left behind the body. The woman
who comes to shake them out and make the bed, her arms
strong from lifting the body that now walks. Eat, she said—
for years—eat, carrying tray after tray into the room where
she sat to rub the slackened muscles, bringing the blood there.
Why isn’t she the miracle? And those sisters in the kitchen,