We should have put you in your hunting coat
Beneath its abstract whorls of pheasant blood.
I think that might have kept you less remote
From cattails and the smell of river mud.
I held you last beneath a locust tree
Where limbs writhed in a passion of leaf fall
Your moon-burned body fitted close to me,
But grief is not original at all.
Though you shall come to summer with no words,
And my arms hold the empptiness of air,
The slate-gray sky will keep its flow of birds;
Sun unto moon forgetting we were there.