Wind circles. Apricots fall.
Noises from the highway drift upward.
Like water from streams that splinter
against rocks, a car horn becomes a splash,
an arrival that moves toward then
away from me, the only thing that opens
the day’s stillness, stirs nests.
Early, I feed the horses, fill troughs,
ice I break with warmer water.
In the afternoon I stalk crows, hunt lizards.
I pitch stones across the surface of pond.
Each one flies further than the last,
each one, a note that rings.
I count the circles of sunlight.
I run through sheets my grandmother
pins on the clothesline, wrap myself
up like a ghost, turn my face into a mask.
I live inside the laughter I become.
Where my voice takes shape,
my arms fly open, wide as barn doors.
Let’s say it is fearlessness.
Let’s say it is the completeness of love.
Let’s say it is being for all the right reasons,
here, where my grandmother sits
in her lawn chair, quiet as silk, here,
where the brim of her hat scoops upward,
a veil of shade I sail past as she watches me
squirt the wind with the garden hose,
shake the water from my hair,
my laughter as loose as I will ever know it,
all these years gone, like the ringing
on the pond, where a breeze shuffles
through me, thick with love.
It’s summer this dream.
And she is the breeze. She is the pond.