Gladly the marigolds smile into the first gentle breezes of Autumn. Angels watch me cavort in a field of four leaf clovers. Nature as vast tundra of self reflection. Nature as guilt and verdict. Nature as a mother possum, hissing at me as she brings her babies across the distant fence. Ignore the deer here. They badmouth me – gossips all of them. Autumn will find me older, aged like a hope and as lined as paper.

Under the fireworks I kiss him with my sensitivity and he sticks his longing down my tongue. All day the sky has been weeping, dreading the maniacal stabbing of fireworks that would pierce it. I wept with the sky, but he wiped away my tears with a newspaper article from 1988. The fact of his warm, strong body being here is some kind of miracle. His presence is wrapped up in dollar store wrapping paper, and I slice it open deftly with my eyes. I will give him the timeless chanting of my heart, echoing as it does in my spacious body.