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James Hoch Soft Shells There's a silence this early autumn afternoon, butter browning in a sauté pan, soft shells dusted with walnuts. There's a bottle of wine half- poured, and the men, too, content, tear the faces off half-alive crabs, lay them gently on their backs. There's a ticking of salt, ratchet of pepper, air hissing through bodies, and even this seems less brutal in silence, as the men watch, through the kitchen window, the women walking out back, following the path under young maples and wind-rattled leaves. God knows what's being said, though they climb and set, climb and set quietly over the ridge, while the men, casually drunk, work with knives and glass, not saying a word about who's dead or dying, struck by car or cancer, not asking whether love fails when made to be other than it is. And even if I told you, my friend, that the men are not you and I, and the women not our new wives heading toward an inevitable dark, that the cabin burned this summer, there is silence in such fiction, moments crisping into a life. Amorphophallus titanum, The Corpse Flower So long as we waited the flower emerged from the seed box in the corner of the greenhouse. So long as the masks fit perfect and the rain fell harmless like a gentle ignorance, so long as we shut the night vents and tended the bed careful like a rag on fire, a child's rage, so long as the gloves were canvas and there was time and everything else mattered less and we kept ourselves quiet and the glass opaque, we could say, isn't it beautiful? The Color For M. Like this madrona, so large it has nearly overtaken a small island, and shedding so clean I almost feel embarrassed for its lack of cover, and watch the bark on the water, slow to drift, sink in the sound, then run my hand over the limbs reddening in the sun, a winter burn, and want to say, sorry; no matter how light or willing, it hurts a little to be touched where there is no skin. Fulgurite Where lightning struck sand,      fused grains into thin roots of glass. What a friend called       branching, as we walked, carefully over the fired beach.      One of the shapes of nature, like rivers & trees, leaf veins,      the lines of a palm, a hand like the boy's in Caravaggio's      The Lute Player, so delicate, so hollow, as if to touch strings       means shattering. Years ago, and now you stepping out      of the shower, I'm thinking of fulgurite & New Jersey      its sad piers, one October, watching a horse harnessed,      lifted by a crane, the look of bewilderment stricken      to its face, legs dangling as it's lowered gently      onto the high dive. I'm thinking of what passes      through its head, each time they prod, stick & voice,      to leap off the platform and fall into a small pool, how holding you was like holding a raw piece of glass, cicadic skin born from white light, white heat, like this hand, mine, now,open enough for the slope of a hip, bend in waist, crest of sacrum, trembling first like an animal, pressed, then a wave low, insistent, hushed against your body.