Summer Visitation

In the June breeze our sycamore casts flickering shadows across the gravel path so they catch my side- long eye behind this big window and I imagine a figure dressed in daisy-white and sunlight and the rose-red of the small geranium shivering in the windowbox: a shadow-flicker figure, intimate and strange as a moment’s visitation, a ghostly good presence flitting into my ken and gone before I have a chance to figure it out. But fair enough, I think, to stand even for an instant in this in-between place— liminal and brimming with possibility, as if some hapless ghost shook off the grave that stayed it from ordinary light and time and space, and offered itself up in our here and now, making the day stop beating quotidian time and hold its breath, so everything in it is turned inside out, though quick as winking the moment is in the past and all is as before as I step from the living- room and look into the commonplace reassurance of the untransubstantiated kitchen and resume my own one daily life again as if nothing had happened.