from How to Stay

I turn my son to the light,

check his calves for ticks. Fingers

hover along downy muscle—

we live in the woods now.

I balance a limb

of tufted evergreen the wind set down

in a vase made in Sausalito. We walked

crosswise through rows of apples,

so I don’t know to name the dark

red peel I remove in a single curling strip.

My daughter lifts her face to kiss me,

milk from my breast still pearling her lip.

Once I walked with my husband

through a swamp, kissed between grips of cough;

now I roll to my side, novel, hot flax pillow

at my feet. Small fingers imprint my skin,

indigo, all over. How can we want

what we have? Your flight

through unripeness, my apricots,

casts our blurred bodies into dusk.

Thick wind-whipped snow subsides

suborned by sun. I talk invisible labor

with Bridget, walk the crest of the hill where my cell

gets signal. What, ending any day, is more real

than nouns I cook: scorched tortilla, scrambled eggs.

Scrape hair from the shower, mine longer now,

his coarse, some silver, from his body. Slice thinnest

shards of apple, leave the toasted almond

on the floor where it fell. This hell

of repetition in an imperfect body.

We should talk more in our new place. I rarely

drive the car, don’t hear the tram,

the slam and crash of drunks, old man

4am digging through our trash. Don’t leave

the hill, cook beef, feel ill, measure weeks

in leaf colors against no habituated bar,

no bars within 10 miles. Uphill, students drink,

yell, sing late with foxes who some mornings

slip through our frosted lawn

into the flooded woods.