AS IN A SACK
AS IN A SACK held shut by cord,
what wasted you, hid in you,
fell quiet each day, ready for us.
Your pain wasn’t physical, hadn’t taken you.
Your body wasn’t yours but a made one.
Nothing pierced far enough to matter.
Drip, and a softening torture
brought us together. Stretched-out arms
felt with fingers for a way out.
STILL HEARD
STILL HEARD in her head: They burn what’s left.
And then he is there again: hands to face,
shut off and steeped in no. His terrible angle of shoulders,
her insistence, sham of control, as what couldn’t be cured or fed
turns wasting from a bowl. She serves him as mother, as wife,
forced to bear up his frame, collapsed. Stand up. You can do it.
His trying to do what she asked.
BREATH THEY COULDN’T
BREATH THEY COULDN’T catch, motion that fell
as a run of shadow on their window
folded into one wish. Time—what was that—
flung over mountains where sun could blink and waver it off.
Clouds muscled in to not let them see the bald sky lying.
The knife-cold privacy exposed a man, and from his window
no motion, just New England birch, stripped limbs in late light.
