Arrow Pointing North

David Dodd Lee’s speaker responds to his wife’s debilitating illness and the threat it poses to their life together by immersing himself in Nature’s dark “Late afternoons, in the fall, while the children / Chase each other with their paper horses, / …the bones of digested songbirds / Thud down / Onto soft green beds, pine needles and moss.” His poems combat physical limitations with a heightening of the senses, and the opening of a symbolic “That landscape of spectral forms / We glide through, silently, unable to speak…”