Here Is an Afternoon’s Refusal to Undo Itself

You are here. You are in the yard. And you are the yard and you are bare feet and you are slipping in the flattened grass and you are toes gripping cold mud and you are a fast cloud peeling back the sun and you are the August heat flooding the tops of trees with salted wind which is also you. You are the flash and crack without seconds between, and you are the other sound that follows which is dust striking a mirror. You are feet slapping across the yard and you are crouching behind the sweet-smelling garbage can. You are fingertips and you are a rough metal lid pushed up and you are the hot breath rising from your tin-rimmed mouth.

You are the rust speckled on its bottom and you are the slug there. You are an overripe strawberry flooded with light. And you are the salt crystals. You are snowflakes touching down on a hot hood. You are a red hill coiling in on yourself. You are the moisture drawn upward by the crystals, and you are the little point of a head lifting. You are the question, and you are the answer, and you are the question.

And you are an aching want in your middle to call the salt back to the shaker, to put the moisture back, to unopen the mouth and walk back through the yard, and peel mud’s thin skin from between your toes and neatly refile it between its blades of grass. Your middle aches to step back into the orange tiled kitchen where you will put things back. The salt to its cabinet. The peach to its juice. The flesh to its bone. And afternoon light will unspool from the floorboards, tracing back across the living room until the sun sinks back to its orange place, and you climb back into bed and under the covers and sleep into unknowing.