Measuring things. Scale, and scope. The bronze fennel wafting up from the valley which is now just a memory of light, of sun splash. A nighttime memory. Also, a hint of larkspur, of lupine. A sanguine breeze, and distantly, dotting the far hillside like fireflies, the flimmering shoals of other lives with their fragrances and worries and yearnings. Outposts in the dark. Beer, warming, the grainy yeast. A car ruddying over asphalt, the pleasures of movement, the pleasure of existing, momentarily, outside of movement. Baseball on the radio. Grainy in its own way. Men in the valley and on the freeway and out into the desert, receiving the same invisible waves. Garlic lingering on his fingers. The imagined moans of distant neighbors camouflaged in the wind. All this matter, ten or twelve or fourteen billion years of it. How much more? How much before or after? What attempt are we on? The susurrant, sibilant crowd. That reassuring hum of a thousand conversations making one, indecipherable. The insects constructing their own symphony, no taste for baseball. The Pacific lolling in the air, a salty whisper. Memories of the first wife, recumbent and spread in a hotel outside Annapolis. Some shared scent, Annapolis in January, Berkeley in June. Forever a mystery. Second wife drifting, unseen and inside, an occasional shadow cutting across the soft glow of home. A dancing shadow, aquiline. Vin Scully calling a swinging strike. A bat pirouetting down from the dark, flittering back into it. Remembering cigarettes. The musty stench in the bottom of a glass. In moments, we manage naked, singular desires.