Chamber Thicket

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, 
in their living room, on a winter night, 
through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps 
and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent 
air was thick-alive with pearwood, 
ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse 
howled, and cat skreeled, and then, 
when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us, 
over us, in us, I felt I was hearing 
the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening 
and grieving and scathing, along each other, 
scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that 
woods of hating longing, and I knew 
and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, 
there—and then, at a distance, I sensed, 
as if it were thirty years ago, 
a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, 
straying toward, and then not toward, 
and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming 
herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted 
to warn him away, to call out to him 
to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, 
but his beauty was too moving to me, 
and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the 
covert, any more, and so I prayed him 
come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.