Onset of Dusk at Wood’s Gulch
The four of us at her picnic table
after his memorial.
Remembrance slowed
to incomplete sentences,
we listen
for evening primrose petals’
yellow to unfurl,
listen for
hummingbird moths
wooed by primrose — their spun wings
simmering night’s quick cool-down.
Probosces, long, wire-thin,
dip into stamens, hover, dip
so near us that we,
inside our listening,
dip again
into his voice: it doesn’t get
any better than this —
not so much
the sentence, more
its quickening pulse —
the this, the this.
* * * * *
Some Nights,
I wake because I hear you stop snoring.
I hold my breath to hear you breathe,
but I don’t hear as well as I once did,
so I breathe as you do; rattle and flute
until the mattress sags as you turn, and
I drift off to your raucous breath-to-breath.
Such nights, arms pinned at my sides
by that dark I hear inside the dark air we share,
my hand can’t lift itself to touch your skin.
That dark’s too dark to measure distance true —
have you edged close to what I fear for you,
or are you just a breathless moment’s sleeper
sprawled near the edge of our wild bed?