your fence, a gentle direction back 

to you, I hover         at your weakened 

posts & in the middle of each season 

I rise like a curse & burn.  I’ve lived 

long in a timeline punctuated by losses:

my mouth to someone I was too small 

to kill, my father ashed in the dregs 

of a bottle, my love of winter cored 

by its insistence that it’s more beautiful 

than me.     In the spring you have a plan 

to write reports for the local paper 

on how the mites are  desiccating 

the chestnut trees.   You want to follow up, too

on the dog whose hind leg met a steel trap

last year, & was adopted by the hunter 

who’d set it.                   You want to go 

together to get a headline so I 

can see my name in the newspaper 

for a good thing. But I’m thinking 

about that dog with three legs & what I would do 

with three legs—all that running away.