Everyday an Emergency


The bees stick to yellow flowers, no: white, but red and
golden too.
I found them shooting out of the violet moon flower.
I stick to
the deer’s breast, seen from the window, and then I find it
hard to
close back up again, harder still to find my way through
thick weeds.
Trailing both my legs, I step over a snake in the middle
of the path.
It’s summer still, I pull grass out of bark and in this way
the road
I’m on becomes a river, cutting through broken trees, I
sense the
snake’s hiding place, the many times I’ve had to shelter
from some visitor’s
prying lens. I cry out as if I were the one to be hunted-or
a child
hurt by the end of a warm afternoon. Poking a stick any-
where the snake
might be, finding honey, and places where birds hide. But
the snake
burrows in a hole that runs remarkably parallel to winter,
rejecting
the greenness of August for privacy. I knew I would find
a way
to stay in the garden. Something about the light folding
back
on itself as I broke the day in half, laid my face on warm
flagstone.
It will take running past the rakes and hoes, past the wild-
flower garden
and the overgrown sunflowers. It will take finding wings
but when I
look at you I don’t want to fly. I come to the place where
a shadow
lies along the late afternoon, and air is opaque. A sudden
silence
catches me off guard so I scream.