Two Poems

Study of Proportions You spent your life with a man, first you were kids together, and then you had to mark things off with an X: voting cards, moving boxes, finally his name, like an honorific. He became an X in a sketched ring, your ex-man, like Leonardo's beautiful nudes. You could understand why someone would want to sketch naked men all day, in between inventing things. If you touch a beautiful man, you have just invented the universe, that alternate one, in which you laugh and are kind to children and sway on Ferris wheels and moral questions; or you become another kind of inventor, brilliant and windblown in the wilderness, pigmenting the canvas with the fallout, your great work, destroyer of worlds.   Butterflies Instead of Snow I watch the skin on my hands ripple under the dryer air. (Hand can also mean writing: her impeccable schoolteacher's hand.) I am in a truckstop, growing older, driving a dead woman's car, drying out. She would say things like, You are a winter, which meant, You suit your funeral clothes. Every time, somewhere in the coffin circumference, the orbiting crudites and crustless egg-salad sandwiches, Oh does it suit you. Isn't she a winter, Marg? Yes, Glor. She's a winter. I must be a winter. The trains, seemingly, are running backwards. Science! Peanuts are passed from hand to hand. A sign shouts Napanee and a number. It's terrific. Let's all shout Napanee and a number. I am shouting right now, on mute, and the highway is also running backwards and my memory, sixteen winters long, is racing to greet it. A knot of cowboys lights its smokes outside the funeral home. Somewhere inside, ladies are crushing hardboiled eggs with grinning steel blades, slitting the brown dye off of the edges of white squares of bread, letting the mayonnaise settle. A cowboy's wife wonders aloud, Is the ground soft enough, do you think? Her husband has been answering these questions all their life. The ground is the least of our worries. Oh shit, yeah, he says. * * * In the morning, the suddenness of light is so bright it could be summer. The light is owning the kitchen window. We stare together at the lake, the spring pallor. I make tea, say Wow, point. The day after your wife is dead, there is still a view. He says, I'm going to pretend those are butterflies, instead of snow.