in the box. And not only that:
we are completely out of celery!
I tell you, real life is a pull and a lure
and a fling-back thing, a need
and a need and a slow-motion slide
through all sorts of partially identified
coming-right-at-you sudden matters.
Some of them just plain practical
to attend to. And then, right before
Autumn, the yard was in Summer,
the whole out-of-doors bobbing
or zooming—at any rate, busy.
I hung our laundry on the line and,
charmed by the shape and efficiencies
of the wooden pins, was made
nostalgic for my own first toys.
Mushroom on the Lawn
What with a stem
so short, a cap
so long, so tall,
so disproportionate
and droll,
what with it standing
so alone on the lawn,
small and white,
nothing like it
anywhere around,
it was easy from the first
to resist the urge
to topple it.
One day passed,
and that cap
resembled more
a parasol
to shelter from the sun
someone pale
and imaginably small,
its silhouette
no less storybook
than on the day
before. But now,
at next day noon,
a bump’s developed
at the center of the cap.
And the surface has
more experience
—with oxygen, I guess.
It’s flecking brown.
If we are reminded of
our own hands
and our own arms,
we might detect
decline in this.
And notice, too,
the veil has dropped.
The cap is drying from
the edges in.
Furthermore,
one side has tipped,
giving us a glimpse
of gills without our close
approach or
stooping much,
visceral
without our touch.
Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?
Each morning my eye goes straight to the high bare branches of the ash
where a plastic Hy-Vee bag tugs and puffs
but has no choice.
Well I won’t see that in France,
I say to myself, but the consolation is as temporary
as the trip will have been
once I’m standing here again,
staring at that bag
and thinking, Now that’s the kind of thing I never saw in France.
It looks so orphaned and waif-like
against the shiny gray bark of the ash and the muted gray of the sky,
so white, so insubstantial, so wanting,
and, even with its one red word,
so caught there in the tree.
I’m certain it can hang on to the branch that has pierced it
for another six weeks.
There may be another bag in the maple by then,
recently freed from a thatch of wet leaves
or come tumbling
lightly from the garbage truck
that will have taken on that day no offering from us.
On the day we come back, it will still be
bare as scattered bones out there,
not yet the middle of March.
the ground will be hard. The grass will be tan.
This is so like me,
imagining,
not the cottage roofs of flat stones
pictured in the Green Guide to the Dordogne,
the massive ramparts for the great gone door of Domme,
but the day after—these littered horizons, and winter
still trying to get out of the yard.
On the day we come back
the
