When I cradle the softest part of you in my palm,
in the rolling weight I feel the stirring of verbs restless for conjugation.

Will leave. Is leaving. Has left.

Already it is May, and from the bridge the skyline
lists like crooked teeth in the loose jaw of the river.

Already the days bend over and into themselves.
Dog-eared pages of a book I’ve read and reread.

O barn swallow, o low-slung eaves! Red whip of wind.
The clutch of featherless bodies flung like fistfuls of apricots

in the surf of the summer’s surge, the weathered boards
that give like a body loved to the point of breaking.

So much of me has been made a mountain,
but I have never aspired to more than these sloping hills

and valleys of pencil shavings, these rivers of sap.
Hold your breath and press forward. Don’t embarrass yourself.