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 order: "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 realm: "That landscape of spectral forms / We glide through, silently, unable to speak..."