Here, we have survived another year—take this bounty, our love,
the resistance we feel between our teeth as seeds crack
and extend their pale finger-selves into paper towel
then earth, buried alive so they may grow into green billowing,
we will eat as a new promise, sauté in garlic, olive oil, feed
to one another as if to say, There is no distance between taking
and giving, a ritual of regret carried out beside the deer head
on the porch, its skin flaked to sodden leather, dark as leaf mulch,
and my hands have traced the pale, trifold stitching of skull,
and I have been in mud today, I have cleaned up shit, clotted
through boxes of frozen chicken—leg after leg split and stacked
like cordwood into the box, splintered bone, flesh skinned pink,
a cold meat—and your hands have set the cinderblocks for a woodshed,
have split the kindling, have dug the grave for the dog who lies
rotting against ledge-rock four-feet down in a frost heave waiting
until the irises spread up over his brindled, poisoned bloom,
his cancer-chewed paw, his canines shining white as the moon
that slips naked to run against our snow-spread lawn as we stand
in front of the door, your arms folding me into you
until I feel it, our hardness—the bicep and bruise of all
the sap buckets we have lifted and poured, every bag of grain hauled,
bale of hay thrown, animals we have mended and killed, tasted, tricked
to the slaughter, every potato forked from the ground, each nail
pounded, the boards above and below us—how all of it binds us,
grafts us, one into the other—our freshly harrowed skin.