Regarding wife
She is no warmer than merely mammal.
Her breath ticks like the twitter of insects
sewn thickly on the grassier planets.
Her scent the incense of corporality,
no holier than one horse or another.
Her bare legs the complex but common
function of oil and muscle and motion;
certainly somewhere there are better.
Her long black hair is the hair of virtually
all Chinese girls; her closed eyes precisely
the color you might guess; her lightly
burnished white gold skin could be
assigned, I suppose, to simply yellow.
She moves against me, and the world
rolls out over the void on a unique arc.
Going clamming by yourself
where you drive up
Gale's Creek
into the Coast Range
and the summit
arrives
without tragic announcement
among the rocky green clamor,
don't you hate how
it becomes
the narrow Necanicum
whose descent, you must consent,
prosecutes thirty heartbreak miles of faithless beauty
to mineral beach
and the infinite leaden Pacific
Fort Stevens
Paul's pickup
threw a rod
and seized up
on the beach
in the fog
a mile short of
the shipwreck
but as he had
sandwiches
and vodka
and a walking stick
he had packed
for a weekend
of clamming
and the weather
being mild
he slogged up
and over the dunes
snuggled into
the salal beneath
some pitchy shore pines
meditated a while
upon the surf
of fog tatters
hurrying overhead
and fell
forever
asleep
