Along the terraced hills, the stone house sleeps,
Its sides slick with night’s cool breath.
The trees above it are thin, silver-backed, almost invisible,
As they lean in waiting for the first pale sound of light.
You’re there, though you wouldn’t see you yet.
I’d hear him before he knew: a cough,
The slow grind of metal against the doorjamb,
A small exhalation, the ledge of another day.
He’s worked so long the grind hums inside him.
The walls are lined with jars,
I slip one free and test its weight
As down the slope, water gathers
Around the ankles of the valley.
The half-spent moon hovers over the hayfields,
Its face pitted with pockmarks from the original blast.
A sleeping horse, one hoof kissing the other, shifts.
The world begins here again each morning
In the faint hum of change in the dark:
So cold, so clear, so cleaned with distance
That when you finally breathe it in, it moves through you
As though it’s been waiting millennia to know what lungs are,
Just so in this darkness you could sing.