Or is it in the mist, in the scarfing umber light where nothing shows

any symptoms. Admit it, the main thing your life lacks

is mist. It’s a common problem, like living

so long you’ve forgotten what to bow before. In this house you go on

eating the dandelion butter you have churned uncertainly,

your uncertainty extending slowly as the antennae of the garden

slug you took these ingredients from. Your child wakes doing math

gleefully because she fears the further loneliness of sleep;

your child, who for days will speak only in the timbrous

barking of a wolf, whose favorite instruments for six years were the clanger and the gong,

who has stopped asking for music and peonies,

who wants only a silence into which, occasionally, you are to describe

the faces of her friends just so she can tell you you have done something inexplicable

and repeatedly wrong.