Chamber Thicket

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,

in their living room, on a winter night,

through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps

and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent

air was thick-alive with pearwood,

ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse

howled, and cat skreeled, and then,

when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us,

over us, in us, I felt I was hearing

the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening

and grieving and scathing, along each other,

scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that

woods of hating longing, and I knew

and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents,

there—and then, at a distance, I sensed,

as if it were thirty years ago,

a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching,

straying toward, and then not toward,

and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming

herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted

to warn him away, to call out to him

to go back whence he came, into some calmer life,

but his beauty was too moving to me,

and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the

covert, any more, and so I prayed him

come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.