From black branches overripe persimmons / drop, sunset skin splitting open to show / their soft-sweet offal, and on cracked mountains / where grapes modestly ripen, old sorrow // is blasted away, like and unlike stone. / The tired, cool wind sweeps down to revive / her. No flood of dark wind, not one, can mow / it all—even here, light leaks from shoreline,

enticing all the sugar quietly
forward. There, she wills her eyes to adjust,
staring at the shadows between white stars,

the sugarheap moon, turning mildly,
the meteors dying in night’s deep must,
and the wide gap between Venus and Mars.