When she leaves her father for him, the landscape
 changes—
the incredible drop-offs at their feet, the pointed
after pointed ranges, near-bald with stones—

aren't just a way of not showing sex, its monumental
suspensions the body sometimes expresses, sometimes not,
oddly aslant the heart;

but pure portrait of contact, pure portrait of danger,
and the old claim, that all of life is in that,
the infinite stopped at its feet. . . .

It's clearly all we have yet: contact, risk;
though love, as always, finds odd nails to hang
itself on—yogurt for breakfast, the ironing board. . . .

Little stammerer, your monumental
silences before the downdraft of these things,
and what boils up from them always, the unlovely

intractable I—cliffside
paths I wander with you as if they were the years
from your age to mine, loving what endangers me. . . .

Then your words hooked, torn—lone eagles—over depth—