May 2022

May 2022

May comes and goes in a hum. Like the soft buzz of the girl’s machine waking up.

There is lightning and there are lightning bugs. There is thunder and there is thunder. And we don’t turn on the lights. We steep nighttime like the tea the girl forgot about and left in the windowsill for weeks. I like to think those are my cups. I hear her offer to the others that she brings around here. But never to me, so the ones she forgets are mine. I claim them.

In the cooling twilight she speaks to me. Asks after the roof. Asks if I’ve seen the rabbits yet today. Asks out the open window if I know what death is.

I push her out to the front porch where her christmas flowers are brown branches that a bird is using to nest in the eaves. Do I know what death is?

The girl is slow and buzzing and more than a little blind. The bird is scared off. Do I know what death is.

The circus is back on the front lawn. “For a funeral,” the girl says. “A celebration of life.” And there are people and there is food and the girl leaves the windows open with the music playing all day.

We practice dancing, the two of us. Myself with the unfooted washer, shaking her lights in the attic, and the girl spinning to no end in the living room. Do I know what death is?

“There is lightning and there are lightning bugs,” I want to ask her, “which one has a soul?”

The day the swarm comes, she has gone down to the river. It has been three days of solid rain, but I am glad to see her come back with my petals in her pocket, not having washed away with the rocks on the bank. Does she know what death is?

My girl and I on opposite sides of the boxwood road, watching the swarm rest on the northwest cedar. Loud as death and quiet as a second coming. This is humming. I hope she hears it. This is humming.

And three from their party stay behind, small and tired stowaways in the bag of potting soil she has on the front porch.

She’ll find them when she goes to plant the radishes, and send them off with the early apples that also won’t see August. She’ll know what death is.

porch light off (to better see the stars),

the apple house