Emily Dickinson Lived and Wrote

It's settled then. The horses walk slowly away from me into a corner of the pasture I recently cleared of milkweed. We used to eat steamed clams at Buddy's in Tiverton, Rhode Island, and those are among my happiest memories, sopping up the plate after with snowflake rolls while Poppa smoked and everybody drank beer. My father had many subtle ways of making sure you knew he was right and you weren't, a gift he got from his father, one which I do not have, preferring to be somewhat more direct about the many errors that go uncorrected in you. Clouds drift east, their shadows darkening hills on the far side of which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote. Not tired, really, but something like tired. Why yes, I have touched a shark, why do you ask? Beloved gardens, still-fruiting apple trees. A sense one has of everything turning out just fine, and being briefly able to live with it.