Late Morning, Western Maine
tucks in bunchgrass its little pill bag of river fog and ease.
Sometimes early in the day,
before the yellows dry,
every possible July might
airlock in the throat.
Lichen across both sides
of the fracture,
was it wrong
to lift it up out of deep clover
into chiseling light
(anything might make sense
but that frog-belly white).
A wasp nest, badly wired, beginning to
short circuit in one corner.
Tarnished star on its little skewer
in a field of Civil War graves. Her child-groom
slotted beside her(a few months
a few inches between them).
He rises so easily from the dead–
the Earth bouncing too easily
as he starts downhill,
legs hitching against the ground
like a pair of kickstands,
but forsythia
closes
behind her and she is gone.
Halfway up the silver maples.
Halfway up one boxelder and the porch step.
What thing, what nipping,
angel comes
down from the drumlin?
Some fever. Some hollow.
The old daub and wattle.
Should we set it on fire?
Should we sit down nearby for awhile?
It is not the wasps crawling out.
It is how they move: tired, surprised.
Like Lazarus, doddering
around the house,
unworthy of a word.