“
Now reading
Little Fugue
An apple paring
curled from the knife wetly
down my thumb—
and what I had failed
to do rightly touching that life
next to mine, wearing
late afternoon’s numb
luminosity, impaled me.
A hunter knee-deep
in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov
might have set there and then left,
back to doctoring,
or choked off as too dark, wanton,
met the steep
flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift,
but stood only, hearing them.
Pouring the last tea
of an evening, dark amber
alive, breathing in quintessence
of India,
I felt limber bark
sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree
with root good, but dense,
dark, local, raw there,
and so in dark woke,
the seeing doctor, two simple
profiles of linked characters
in his air,
cruel, good, a pair ample, true
across that split yoke,
true to its splayed force—
simple so rare, though.