Contact

and sex once
a day a week a
month a year
goes by and one
hyacinth only
returns, frail
blue against the militant
grass that does cover all
in the residential
precinct of the
New England town
its roads long paved
old Indian trails the steps
they took toward
us the first
exchange for a fish
two biscuits
 

Maureen McLane, "Contact" from World Enough. Copyright © 2010 by Maureen McLane. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: World Enough (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)