Heavy fog converts fireworks into half-hearted jokes. Bold rabbits, the dark tips of their ears.

Milky rain rivers down the hill, dismantling pavement; foams up the driveway, wind-driven; smashes on every surface, scatters. Then: a second set of spruce tips emerges.

Haze. Shining flanks of cows and horses. Fields of drowned flowers.

Orderly as crib railings or cell bars, forsythia shoots rise from curved upper branches, while the boughs bent lowest learn to root.

At dusk a bloated skunk passes under the windows, lumbers through the bee-abandoned milkweed toward the crabapples, already ripe to falling.

A low drone—mechanical, not cicadas—unspools close to midnight. They’re spraying, remember? Close the windows. (Fox interrupts a streetlamp.)

Skunk kit dead on the morning road.
A white carousel horse draws a sleigh through Jurassic ferns.

The air is soup, is still. Tomatoes fruit. Lilies crown. Our appetite disappears. The power goes out.

Two woodpeckers scout a cherry tree, silent as the mist. A tufted titmouse pair sleeps or feigns death in the crabapple. Two chipping sparrows, open-beaked, stalk clover like velociraptors.

Could you believe in omens? In a mall parking lot, two dragonflies settle across from each other on twin cottonwoods. Pillars guarding a passage.

The rain nexts and nexts.

Hemlock shelters a rabbit. (Its foot thin and naked.) Crab grass fluoresces. Marigolds rot.