Strays in the Thaw

Perhaps I know why you stare
at their bodies, slight and almost lovely
after sunless months
in winter’s jar. I touch a soiled glove
to your hand, drape my gaze
like a pocketless shroud
over their crumpled repose.
I picture them at mewling defeat,
huddled for warmth that could not come

in time. With collar turned to snap of
March, I suggest we get back
to the yard work—our epidemic in
chickweed, branches, dead leaves
that hide dead bodies.
I repeat what I said on a horrible day
in a horrible room:
that passing isn’t more
than a rocking Sunday hammock. (All cock and bull.)

At night, as sleep takes me, so you take
the cavernous station wagon
down to the lake and the waterfront cottage
where once you dwelled as a girl. By darkness
you slink to the foaming shore and hunt
for the hidden slabs of shale
on which you scratched your life’s first secrets:
your hatred for recitals, the pink-eared boy
whose eyes you longed to kiss

and the names you planned to give your babies.
You frantically turn rock, split thicket,
but every piece of shale is mute
by damning touch of water.
You feel each misplaced name
wrested always out of you, the precise ache,
those slanted slackened mouths
as voiceless as the swells of fur
we threw to our heap of compost.

Then you tell me this months later
as you spit up red swallows of ice wine. I don’t ask
but still wonder about your trip home
after the search, about the way you toiled
back into our bed that cool spring night.
Did you curl up against my sleeping body?
Or did you roll away, fighting
the instinct that whispers us still
when the time at last has come to huddle?