No shame lingers in the tall grass where you laid me down,
no sad place beneath the new layers of snow,
nor any sign of the seed you spilled. The grass no longer
tells the story of our bodies with a hollow like those made
by sleeping deer. I stand here now, missing you, and it is hard to say
what was lifted above us into the September air.
The moment was so perfect I was certain we’d conceived a child,
and you mentioned the same feeling,
the possibility of conception and how the field was a nice place
to make a baby.

The smell of wild apples baking in the sun, the salted air off the Atlantic —
that place held our unborn children. They wavered above us, innocent,
untouched spirits let loose by unhinged lust and lifted skirt,
freed like tiny hawks craving the sky.

Some of them will come back to us, to grow in my womb,
to grow your mouth and my eyes, your hair and my nose.

That day was the day they found us, watched us eat wild apples
and walk the shore with our black dog, watched us make love in a field.
Perhaps later they saw me find the dead grass snake
on the dirt road — remember? — its green scales turned blue by the sun,
and our children, momentarily distracted, remained unborn.