After Rain

November twilight— the scarecrow still stands alone. Sparrows left in June.

The earth is trying something underneath— you feel it in the softness of the ground, a stirring, like a sleeper holding breath

August is a thief who comes dressed as a gift: the peach at its most golden

Praise the cracking open of the seed, the blind ambition of the buried root, the robin's first bewildered, breathless creed

I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window,

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat