Waking in Maine

The trick to dodging the dawn through your bedroom window is never effective: you arch the sheet over your eyes, retreat into sleep, wake again to the rasp of light across your face. There’s no contest here: the day will be. You go outside, where the yew hedge squats on a bleached lawn, inhabiting its own darkness. Purple cone flowers in their temporary pots ask you to feel the pull of soil beneath your sandaled feet and have pity. A tree drops its net of shade over the street. It’s a vigorous day, sliding heat along your hair; a contentious day, setting the electric buzz of cicadas against the barking of a fretful dog, the D minor wail of a mower against the low C of a motorbike out on Route 1. What are you in this? A flower but walking, longing turned into a leaf. Everything in this place is this place. Something still asleep mutters from the room of dreaming, but the day has no patience for ghosts, and soon you are beyond the reach of haunting.