The Tips of Your Fingers

A slackening rain offers its small rhythm
to the rooftop, a soft shudder runs
through the house. On the radio,
Roethke is reading
of a woman he knew.
You are wearing
one of my shirts.

Now, I know it’s no more
possible to own a moment
than a person, but sometimes
we can settle into one,
like a tide returning from the shore,
a soft relaxing back into the sea.

Wind slides the unlatched door
open, mist from the rain
catches the ends of your hair.
On the tips of your fingers,
my body seems achingly beautiful.

Today, we could begin to grow
back every limb we have lost. 

Stargazing

She keeps trying
to show me Orion,
pointing to his belt
in the night sky,
and I try to picture him
—but I've never been much
of a hunter, for food
or for love, for that matter.

Now, Auden may be right,
poetry might make nothing happen,
but when she points
I think of Roethke,
how he wrote he measured time
by the swaying of a body
and I know
I measure something
older and far more still
by how three distant suns
can balance
on the tip of her finger.