Tracking

Crocus, dark

bulb starting a slim leaf,

you hide your blade

at your stomach.



Soon it will ease

into dirt, a small tongue

to kiss silt. A cut.



Love, I don’t have

a grip on tenderness—

those ruffed crests

of pampas grass crush



in my hands.  I test

red blades beneath:

they slit gills along

my fingers. I travel



from red edge to feathers,

is this tender?  I can’t

be sure.  I saw a goose

swoop up. She left like



an adze wedged into

wooden clouds. I stood,

rooted. We decided

to accept our luck,



the way a mare lowers

her nose over a fence,

parts shuttered lips:

Here’s her overbite.



She clicks at slipped apples,

her teeth close

around fruit

precisely as calipers;



although leaves are tapping

against apples,

and thrumming like bells

through white fields.



Now this morning,

after rain, when streets gleam

like syrup, you

are the woman who stretches,



tipping her chin back. Outside,

dark arrows pass

at the window.  Birds

sound a quiver of distances.



Inside the room,

light girds our two bodies

like wire in a cloisonné bowl,

glazed and separate enamels.