Beggary

In winter, it’s true, sometimes we dressed
our days like small fires fed meagerly

the low clouds giving us silence and rain
and us bowed by it into ourselves,

into gnashing the few bright wings and red
we found flying in the dark between us like words

while the river murmured on behind us
like two stone-drowned lovers breathing,

but I lived up here with you with the sun’s face
lying down into your lap, unhesitating

as it descended through the sundial firs in love
with the timbre of its own splash on your flesh

the way I loved it too, but listen: the waters
are emptying themselves from beneath our feet

and the owl is navigating the space between
the trees coldly, knowing we are leaving,

so remember the way the hummingbird
was a lamp to the summer ceiling one day

and then sitting in my astounded hand
between us, its heart the wind within fire,

as though everything was combusting at once,
that all was flame and feather and sun,

as though here, at the end of all this,
we could still somehow receive

such a tremendous wealth.

Arachne

As she spoke to him on the phone
he killed spiders. She urged him not to.
She was moving out in four days. Leaving
the legs of rain behind to run the window’s face.
Coming to him in Arizona. Where the wind
made promises of barrenness in the sky
and kept them. But she was pregnant.
It was the abstractness that frightened him.
The thought which had become unreal.
It was Socrates who ruined Athens after all.
Then she asked to stay and he watched
something slide between them, black
and sideways. He did not raise his hand.