Face down is how she found him, hard-
Humped as a nursery rhyme turtle,

The ears fluted and mineral, the spleen black-
Jacketed in dust. For this kind of privacy,

He likely paid dear, leaving everything half-
Done: his work tacky with glue and seam,

Daughters unborn, partially sketched on dream-
Vellum, his wife bewildered, blunt-

Edged in bed, reading the same sentence
Back to herself, stuck on the words for it: love-

Damage, the unknowable seeping into hard spaces.
Had what he said last to her mattered

More than the rest? The rest is ellipses, petrified,
Stiff pennies dropped, thought-

Less as the hemisphere of trench that is his bed
Now. It’s all object: his ossified body

And the cove that covets it. The ochered fingers,
Wooden ventricle, the book of him,

Half-crooked, happily closed.