I rise from our tousled bed and adopt my distance
and find something friendly in the shack collapsing
season by season down the road at the edge
of the grove of birch and beech. The floor
buckles, clapboards sag, wires hang askew
like muscles in a bungled autopsy.
Lemon-yellow wall skin blisters
into robin’s egg blue. The sun lays down
an ultimatum through broken panes,
sheaf by sheaf of brilliant, illegible prose.
Your theorems will oxidize, my lines
will crumble to mulch. Whoever lived here
has shoved off into another atmosphere
and we, too, are simply passing through
though the sky is trapped, for now, in a window frame—
cerulean miniature with one fish-spine tree—
while the solstice grinds its teeth,
yawns and stretches, crawling from its den.
