What is the name for the years when the bed eats you whole? 
The moon is a friend. The clock is not. The years before 

the therapist's kind questions about the nature of should, 
this diagnosis and the next. When I drove over bridges and fought

the jerk of the wheel. What do you call the view from stars
to earth? From orbit, we are to astronauts as they are to us.

To us the moon a thumbnail. There should be a name for the map
pollen makes after rain, when it pools in waves and the heat

will not wait. A word for my hand and your arm bridging
over an earthworm dried in sun. False spring, my irises

bloom late. Each rose is spattered black. A season more 
and the fence will fall, buckled by red clay washing the culvert.

Someone will replace it, the bradford pears cracking in any wind, 
the old roof. What do you call the division of plants that will not grow,

that choke themselves together? When my daughter asks about 
the baby swallows, I should lie and say they all flew strong to find

a tree in someone else's yard, next year they'll come back. What do you 
call this from space? Mountain range a coffee spill, oak a ghost of breath.