the sand at Martha’s Vineyard, where we vacationed last year,
separating us from the ocean

where we swam, then returned to our blanket,
the two of us making one marriage,

sharing the apple sliced to reveal the identical
black seeds of its surprised face.

Even our bodies can be halved, although less evenly:
lungs partitioned into lobes, the heart’s blood

pumped from right to left, the brain’s two hemispheres
directing our arms, our legs,

our lives into the two possibilities of the Greek mask.
My life’s work, too, is divided—

one side of my desk, unfinished poems;
on the other, nursing books with dog-eared pages.

Aren’t we all somehow divided?
Like when my daughter was in labor, my first

grandchild emerging into the room’s blue air,
suddenly entering new territory,

and how, when after the delivery my daughter kept bleeding,
I couldn’t look at the newborn in the incubator

but stood fast beside my child, the woman who once
slipped from my life into her own and now had divided herself
again