Out of the white noise of a box fan shushing away summer heat
hours on end comes the strain of violin whispering elusive notes to me
until I listen more closely and the melody is gone; out of the glare
of relentless July sun emerge a thousand Seurat points of hue,
lime, lavender, pale pink of the petunias in the pot on the stoop, dancing
in a texture in the sky until focus brings them back to the mundane blue
of the child’s question; out of the vague vertigo of lying down mid-afternoon
comes a sense of the million worlds in orbit about each other, no
center to be understood, ordered only by the invisible whims of gravity
and chance. I have taken her kindnesses and carefully sifted from them
an ash that I will cup greedily in my hands until the evening breeze
kicks up and threatens to carry it away. The trees outside the window
begin to toss their leaf-shaggy branches the way restless horses
toss their manes when they sense trouble but don’t know what