Rain. Purple dahlias in plastic buckets, sacks of topsoil, a bent trowel. A week later the snails have eaten the dahlias and when we plant coleus in their place we remember to lace the soil with poison pellets. That the world is ultimately unknowable makes images so complexly evocative. Music, sunlight through the slats of the broken window shade, perception, the apprehensible, drawn into the mystery of the senses, fingering the shards of the mosaic, pebbles flecked with tourmaline, their weight, their smoothness in the palm while the fingertips read their facets as beveled ridgelines eroded as the wave-worn striations of a seashell. Texture of our days so hard to pin down: the action figures in the bathtub and the eggshells in the sink and the Martha Stewart Living on the floor and the catalogs and the mall and the Jackie Chan movie we took the boys to see and the pizza restaurant where the charming Brazilian waitress brings us, as a special favor, glasses of the frozen after-dinner drink we secretly detest. Stop. Or, slow down. Hours pass, a night, a week of sickly dawns. Light doubly filtered through the palm fronds and white lace curtains to the wooden floor scored by old termite tunnels, termite colonies rising and falling, empires chained to iron wheels and slick metal cogways, pistons, belts, engines idling in vast machine sheds as the night crew emerge from their labor into fog from the ice-bound Monongahela. Snow exists only on the tar-paper roofs and the slick skins of the automobiles, quickly melted as the steam rises from their coffee and the smokestacks imply the arrow of human intention by their strict verticality against the sky’s infinite and infinitely erasable vision field. Liminal. Ice on a river, forming, a journey taken, the flow, ice melting back into the stream bearing the marks of the ice-skaters on its hide, its rind, runes of elaborate randomness chiseled in frozen dust. Life in the surface of things, artifactual energy, layer upon layer, room after room, paper through the printing press overwritten with inscrutable directions, sheets cut and bound, and handled, and sold, and shelved in the great library of time, and lost, and rediscovered, and shredded to be thrown as confetti at the ticker-tape parade of a forgotten hero. Winter birds. Weeds poking up at the edge of the asphalt. Shoes piled in a basket by the door. Umbrellas, a lunchbox, a brown paper shopping bag, the familiar loops of its handles, arc of the string like the curve of the skater’s trajectory and the steam from the cooling towers blown west. Or south. Deep familiarity of the house. A green candle, photographs in silver frames, impression of a canceled stamp. And in the morning Elizabeth calls us to the garden to see what our husbandry has wrought: a massacre of snails.