For our daughter’s sake, I’ll remember       sweat
like an hour glass on the back of your       shirt
as you axed the felled branches for      winter.

The man who first crushed flour       understood
you’d come, oil and water on your       hands.

The tenure track. The afterglow.
The rage, the Prize. You never know.

While working the graveyard shift,
I see Aphrodite in the froth
of a rabid dog’s lips.

Beneath two arches
a straight line,
scrawled into the child’s
blue imagination
the prison shape for bird.