The sun is gigantic over the horizon (just a moment ago, the shutting off of lights). She can’t tell if it is rising or setting. A hermit thrush is singing on the corner of her granny’s springhouse roof (that’s me, but she doesn’t know me yet). She puts her bare feet (where were the socks they insisted she put on?) in the cool water flowing out from under the moss-encrusted, wooden door. She swings it open—as light as light (just after the sheet a breath couldn’t lift). She kneels down and splashes her face with coolness (getting more distant—the fever and the rattle) which runs off her chin, back into the water. Her face glimmers in the spring as it reflects a young girl’s freckles, long brown curls, and green eyes. She stands to stretch her legs (already an infinity ago, the octopus of tubes). She breaks out into a run across the hill crest. She bolts past her granny’s barn—the doors are wide open. Some whitetails—two bucks and a doe—are watching from the edge of the forest. She barely pays them a passing glance (she doesn’t yet know that these are her children). The sun is glinting golden in her hair. A breeze is bathing her in the scent of forest. (The world is no longer shaking. The world is no longer on fire). There is a rambling farmhouse over the next hill. A young woman is calling her name behind the whitewashed newels of the back porch. She runs to her faster and faster. Her granny. In an instant, she is surrounded by the musk of the yellow roses blooming by the back door. Granny is beaming, with her arms open, ready to tell her everything she already knows.

all day rain
I throw a handful of earth
into the universe

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published in Notre Dame He is the winner of Rattle: Poets Respond, the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award and the Trailblazer Award.