Stag’s Leap

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine

looks like my husband, casting himself off a

cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

His fur is rough and cozy, his face

placid, tranced, ruminant,

the bough of each furculum reaches back

to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up

and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,

unwieldy. He bears its bony tray

level as he soars from the precipice edge,

dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart

leaps up. Even when its I who am escaped from,

I am half on the side of the leaver. Its so quiet,

and empty, when hes left. I feel like a landscape,

a ground without a figure. Sauve

qui peut—let those who can save themselves

save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone

tiny being crucified

on a fallow deers antlers. I feel like his victim,

and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched

legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he

throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his

faithfulness, as if it was

a compliment, rather than a state

of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he

feel he had to walk around

carrying my books on his head like a stack of

posture volumes, or the rack of horns

hung where a hunter washes the venison

down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,

leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old

vow have to wish him happiness

in his new life, even sexual

joy? I fear so, at first, when I still

cant tell us apart. Below his shaggy

belly, in the distance, lie the even dots

of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots

clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their

blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

The Worst Thing

One side of the highway, the waterless hills.

The other, in the distance, the tidal wastes,

estuaries, bay, throat

of the ocean. I had not put it into

words, yet—the worst thing,

but I thought that I could say it, if I said it

word by word. My friend was driving,

sea-level, coastal hills, valley,

foothills, mountains—the slope, for both,

of our earliest years. I had been saying

that it hardly mattered to me now, the pain,

what I minded was—say there was

a god—of love—and Id given—I had meant

to give—my life—to it—and I

had failed, well I could just suffer for that—

but what, if I,

had harmed, love? I howled this out,

and on my glasses the salt water pooled, almost

sweet to me, then, because it was named,

the worst thing—and once it was named,

I knew there was no god, there were only

people. And my friend reached over,

to where my fists clutched each other,

and the back of his hand rubbed them, a second,

with clumsiness, with the courtesy

of no eros, the homemade kindness.