Here is the summer house—the picnic dishes, the drawer of dull knives, the white sheets on the line that work the air of the cooler days like sails, like lost souls, like wings that need more imagining, filling the yard—huffing and brimming.
Here are the seventy-year-old antlers, the glass buoys, the miniature cairns of white pebbles, yellowed paperbacks, checkers, frayed semaphore flags, the tightly furled nests in the eaves of barn swallows.
Here is the swallow herself—swooping, whirling, screeching—frantic to return to her four wet beaks.
Here is the path to the gravestone like a trick map, like a prank, like an incomplete thought. Here the dip in the lawn where the groom found the bride, here the fever of remembering, here the work we do that we love to do.
Here lay my baby in my mother’s lap, drifting through his dream of the whine of an outboard. Here on the porch, the sweet globe of a plum. Here the tooth that pierces the peel like a door burst open, like a flood, like an afterlife.
Here are the children engulfing the house in a game of sardines, each one tucked tighter into the pooled dark of the closet until a single child is left to enter the room calling out, sensing in the hush that the rest have found each other—her hand lingering on the doorknob.