First day of clearness after
an interminable week of rain.

Boots and a dress and a gracious plain
of a face recalling wheat, toeing the
threshold of harvest.

Stilted conversation until we come to it.
What is the status of that thing
you imagine to be your heart?

occupied; vacant; ossified; fissured
into a thousand valleys each with its
own river, joy at the headwater, and
a thousand corpuscles of grief at the delta.

This girl is fragile. But then, there is
ineluctable hunger.

Always, new provender