…Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
— Seamus Heaney

In the next room my wife talks to our grown son.
They say we need to clean death from our houses,
those dried flowers on the mantle, the peonies
whose brittle burgundy I watched double in the mirror,
the hydrangea its papery snow flakes rigid enough
to break, the leathery artichoke in the kitchen
I traded with Neal for a book, all are in danger.

They have been at their books again, and I think
of the brick of turf from George Moran's shed
near Drumgildra, the brick drying on this desk
for ten years. It was thick with rain from the eighties
when Molly Moran sat across from me
over double shots of Powers holding a photograph
of my mother dead then fifteen years.

Too much the bog man here in this other room,
too willing to keep, to hold what's gone one way
to make it stay another, to keep her voice
with its lushness soft and steady as windless rain,
the silent falling strings earth to sky
in layers whose refrains are the kind things
someone whispers when I have lost, when

my understanding matches the dog's sleeping
at my side, words are tone, and her tone
tells me, good dog, good dog, stay, stay.
I think to tell them the cork screw willow in the vase
by the window smell of fresh water even now,
it is the Yakima River where it bends at the trestle
the river my father swam after picking apples.