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—