You’ve picked quite a time to come visit. The weather ripples unseasonably warm, overzealous June heat usually reserved for dog days of August and July. Dog days: a phenomenon concerning stars and ancient Rome more than panting canines—the transit of Sirius, brightest star after the sun. This fickle summer arrives in solstice and swelter but has already been felt over and over, already sweat out through every pore.

***

[a small breath prayer, composed in motion]

Inhale: You are a great mystery, God.

Exhale: I do not need all of the answers.

***

Each day, I glide among constellations of my own making, webs linking others through mere perception; gaze and assumption operate like twin heartbeats. On the street, I construe, construct, and elude: passerby seen as best friends, father and son, a couple. How many times am I wrong? Naming for convenience, weaving fables in the absence of piercing truth. I do not want to build my life on such inaccuracies, these minute adjustments and formulas. But what else is there? In what other way can we know the world?

***

“I am content because before me looms the hope of love. / I do not yet have it; I do not yet have it. / It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites; / unless I pull, it is strong enough for me. / I do worry the end of my days might come / and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave / upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be? / I held things here, and I felt them. / And to all I felt I will whisper hosanna for goodbye. / It is sweet to think of myself, alone at that very moment, / able to say such a thing / to all that was my life, / to all that was not.”

—Katie Ford, “Psalm 40”

***

On the bridge’s arc, past flickering golden hour and pavement’s radiating heat, I felt peace with tender step come knocking. I said, Come in at last. I said, I am so very tired of fighting.

***

“I lay out under / A separate sun. Both of us are fine / With this. We picked our place / Under the lid of god and we shut / Our eyes to it every night. That’s what it means / To have loved goodly—to meet / Fate in a lavender hall and walk / Right past it, the white train quivering, / Nostalgia in your wake” —Camonghne Felix, “Why I Loved Him”

***

I am gazing at the meadow where little cousins sought fireflies, my fingertips raspberry-stained. I am half-sun and half-shadow, twisting away from insects—the ants that infiltrate the kitchen but shun cinnamon, doggedly swarming up the wall. I am reading words I have read before, knowing they will mean something else now. I am turning the page.

“How lush the world is, / how full of things that don’t belong to me—”

***

“it might be years / before you turn and stop, startled / by the sweet and sudden smell of sheets snapping / in the sun, and the drunken lilac, prairie purple, / blooming, by the doorway, because you planted it” —Marie Howe, “Keeping Still”

***

Ammi: known as false Queen Anne’s lace or bishop’s weed, a member of the carrot family, a cold-tolerant wildflower, that which constitutes the field; when its unassuming sap meets human skin in sunlight, it can scar and blister for months…

***

“even / a small purple artichoke / boiled / in its own bittered / and darkening / waters / grows tender, / grows tender and sweet / patience, I think, / my species / keep testing the spiny leaves / the spiny heart” —Jane Hirshfield, “My Species”

***

One day of sun, and the world is pure again—it has aspirations. My tote bag crunches rhythmically, the spoils of a picnic grocery run shuffling for space. I am here and here and here. I am far from where I envisioned; I am exactly where I started; I am where I am meant to be.

I am a shadow, moving. My presence here evokes an absence elsewhere, and I see my silhouette bob along the leaves and friends of weeds, across from the cemetery walls too high to climb.

***

“But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere, / and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds / with the wooden spoon, I remembered, / this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture / after gesture, what else can we know of safety / or of fruitfulness?” —Marie Howe, “From Nowhere”

***

On the pier, we nibbled snacks like unanticipated communion—a punnet of blueberries and a delicious orange olive oil doughnut, drawn and quartered. One of our napkins blew into the lake, scarcely a lake but a sea, though I soon leaned over to fetch it as we laughed and a watching man on the shore gave us an enthusiastic thumbs up. I have a theory that perhaps the world awakens at sunset; regardless, we were thinking more than ever of color then. You said I am the grey-blue of my eyes, notes assuring calm and clarity. You are harder to place, the effervescent orange and fuchsia of hibiscus and California poppies. Life is but moments: moments destined to end, moments destined to be lived a hundred times over.

***

Words scribbled, prophetic, in the beginning of May: “May something come of my emptiness. May the Lord make more of my emptiness than I could with my fullness.”