I’m outside eating a bag of cold cherries,
my lips bloodied with ripeness.

Sealight christens the grass
where the dog we’ve named after you

lies down low in a ditch.
My daughter steps inside our abandoned cottage,

three of the five windows shattered,
a hummingbird dead on the floor.

This morning, before we drove out here,
my neighbor hurried after me with a poem

he’d transcribed from refrigerator magnets.
Not sure what he wanted, I can still hazard a guess.

Because what is a poem if not the intention
to pin the river we are becoming down before dinner?

Already the evening’s first bats work the sky’s trapeze.
The dog is a whisk dipped in mud,

so that wherever I touch him, I darken.
Now my daughter lays the tiny bird in her palm

and looks close at the delicate overlay of plumage,
the iridescent rust and emerald wings,

a stippling on the throat’s underside.
Only the orbitals empty. And why not believe

it was you that set this miraculous corpse here;
that has visited us again, but this time to speak clearly

to the devastation the poem calls a heart,
and the heart calls a poem,

neither knowing exactly how to keep alive
anything wild and doomed.