After toast and eggs and talk of flying
South for the spring,
you see a heron rise out of the morning
white fog hovering over the river.
Look, you say to me at the car.
That’s a blue heron. Yes.
On our way back to my house
where you will call your boss
to say you won’t come in today,
we watch five deer in a line jump
the fence and cross the lane
and Emerson’s Run.

We don’t make love again, rather
knees to knees
on the still warm bed
listen to the rain now
praying on the tin roof,
survey our pasts
and the lines on our faces,
a delicate curve of shoulder
first noticed. Everything yes.
I pause and taste each detail,
like age twelve, when your mother
asked you to steal your baby sister
and run away from your father
on the Greyhound Bus.
My Goddess, I laugh, you are one
of those missing grocery bag girls.
Yes. Your brown eyes understand
when I whisper how rarely
the falling in love stage is
fully lived and well performed,
how we save back
for fear it is not real
and will not last.
Does a night last, or youth,
or life. Even the sun now
hidden above the mist and rain
is burning this rain up,
and one day itself.
Is thus the sun not real.
Does thus the rain not last.

That evening on my way to class,
Survey of Romantic Lit,
I rehearse my lines on William Blake:
Heaven is now. Heaven is wild.
A hawk swoops down in front
of the car, flashes and wags
its red tail within a giant’s grasp
of my driver’s side window,
balancing on the wind
like a first prize photograph,
then gliding into the woods
down Emerson’s Run.