Pennies dissolve to water in the wishing wells, a kind of camouflage, the opposite of memory. What persists is shadow at the edge of things, debris in the gaps between sidewalk and street, door and doorjamb, cracks between all the comings and goings. Under the eaves, deep in the crevices, fillers mend and dispread, untranslatable thoughts fusing the planks, the inner machinations between floors. Basements, attics, crypts, storage for all that is truly ours: honey in the tombs sweet after centuries of pharaoh’s decay, burs carried from the woods on sleeves, pollen on the legs of bees. Rooted in the dust and mud, the muck and manure of history, the blossom of an African daisy floats in a glass of water, a bit of sand in the oyster, a skip in the old song becoming part of the song, grit and gravel, what passes undigested and remains itself. It is the key that should not have been swallowed, only to dislodge in the later years of autumnal refrains. But by such metal a door was unlocked to returns and further disclosures, the aromas of decay that mimic and remake the spring arrivals, the bursting hyacinth, the rain and resilience.

Fire burns behind the walls of this weather: morning clouds smolder the fields, threading gray light through the gold, dry grasses of January. A confusion of warmth melts the evening rain. The shed’s red siding smokes. An oak’s bare branches lurch into the winter air like an insight, an epiphany of wet bark, under whose protective arms all the puddles release their smallest reflections, their briefest or dimmest impressions of passing hubcap, cat tail, late autumn leaf and every bird that gathers to drink.