You Learn The Shine

The barbed wire advanced, clutching and dredging, finally covering. Bear scat, grape seeds, dew. Framed by either side of the trail, the older dog refused the woods. Behind me, ducks noisily lifted off the cold pond. Sunrise.

Crookback moon waxing or waning, bright chalk against a violet sky. Season of goldenrod all but impossible to get into words. The neighbor's apples fall all night, soft thumps inside the wind. You wake tired, angry and fighting it. There is barely time to write this poem.

It is a poem! And these are paragraphs. Inside the night, muted prayers appeared as houses in which nobody had lived for a long long time. Tangle of blankets, a chickadee scratching the cellarwell clover, dogs pacing, needing to pee.

And tea, that blessing. Carried into the fields where my feet got cold and wet and the older dog staggered, listing like a drunk. You were there, pointing out the low hill behind which the sun was just scratching. I know now that you don't carry every piece of quartz home, especially when it's wet. You learn the shine and leave it everywhere.