Gnats spin down pricking
the tensed, emerald lens
of this tarn. For the hour,
trout strike, flashing,
and weave away.

All this water’s parted, day by day,
from sky, now tilting
so suddenly and unreasonably
clear. The few
winnowed clouds maneuver,
gilt by the sun
in decline. Why

is it so hard
to hold the mind
still? At one end,
the outlet tips glassy
over a length of log,
begins its effortless,

ratcheting fall
from one conclusion
to the next.

Your scapula, lost continent, drifts
fforward on your back, reefs
against your ribs, and when your tasked arm
wings away from your side, is fixed,
framed, swallowed in the raised bed
of muscle that is the shoulder girdle,
whole-cloth, contracting. With that,
the humeral head can picot, elbow unclasp,
wrist cock, and fingers, arriving receptive
at the object in question,

grasp. The first time I saw you, you
were in the fogwhite orchard, soaked
to the skin, picking pears. And for a while,
of the million things I knew I wanted,
I wanted you, stretched out, muscular
most. Now our kids, counting off
calendar days, ask me what I want
for Christmas, and I can’t think
of a thing. It’s not as if I’ve given up
wanting, thought I’d want that, if it
were possible, certainly. It’s that

I want now, at my deepest reach,
a next breath, and epiphany periodically,
your shoulder blade, shuttle-stone,
shearing by me under freckled skin.
I want to leave the something useful,
signal stars they can use to navigate,
the goods and gods grouped start make.
I want to give back the yellow budgie
my grandmother set shaking on my finger,
its jerky, hallucinated swivel, its strangely
transported song.

Toccata
– from the Italian to toccare, to touch. A composition for a keyboard instrument intended to exhibit the touch and technique of the performer, and having the air of improvisation.

Leave alone the mechanics, the fluid algorithm of swivels
and pivots, the racked joints, small reciprocations,  cast arm
feathering, tension measured, trajectory trimmed, to bring
the tip of my finger to the line of your back, then down it
slowly, to the small.

Twenty years ago, negotiating that curve
for the first time, I’d deciphered, by night’s end, the floors
of the mansion, placement of guards, the thwarts and bottle-
necks, the scars’ crimped script, the righteous path, the falloff
to thistles, the clearly marked, yellow-flashing proceed with
caution, yes.

Now, October, the boys and I have loosened
a row of russets with a fork, and are down, elbow-deep in dirt,
feeling for the satin jackets, dragging out the disinterred
with shouts. And later, in a glavanized tub, we scrub them
clean by feel, working over the submerged nubs and ridges
blindly, each finger-pad a transducer, portal, taking in, paying
out, restoring the irregulars, in a muddy roil, their deep,
otherwordly pink.

For one moment, the boys move through
the world with a tenderness, an easy grace, and it’s a dream,
I think, an improbability, an anomalous, short-lived statistical
trend. And you and I fall into bed each night exhausted, alarms
armed, and turn, in bewilderment, to each other. Some brave
finger describes an arc, a brushed kanji character, a slow
downward scrolling of the bleak middle text, a Braille search
for that slender passage where we last, in some previous life,
transported and exlaiming loudly together, left off.

1. We passed, on the wetlands boardwalk,
through stands of cattail higher than our heads,
clacking and nodding, dry as October corn.
And the flitting and whistles within them were
redwings, no question, though we saw, in
the end, only two: slanted crimson shoulder
blaze, the conk-a ree and trailing buzzy trill.

And I, still raw then from the ferocious
novelty of our lovemaking, couldn’t see the reed
sway, or the taut blackberries, or the heron’s
neck coiled to stab, without reaching for you,
hand feeling back as the cahttering kingfisher
spiraled down like a dropped package, plunged
in, exploded out, the plucked herring, dime-
silver, half-swallowed, clamped in his beak.

2. Mornings I’d study the curve of your arm
because I was dissecting an arm, the long
forearm muslces tapering to ribbony tendon,
each gathered at the wrist’s cinch like stemps
through the neck of a vase. I was coming to

understand how fingers worked: the balanced
mechanics, tensioned lines, tracked pulleys,
and action fine and sublte enough to cover
a lover’s touch, sliver’s end, concise Chopin
etudes. Now, at work, I take a damaged hand

in mine and move it slowly, repeatedly,
through patterns it can no longer do itself. And
the patient will watch the odd choreography
sourly, as if not wishing to be reminded of that
language, that flown ease and fluency, of what
his larking touch once, unencumbered, could do.