Fog hovers over a meadow. A skunk disappears into its hillside. No time to linger.

Soft rain soaks only the middle air.

The hemlock tips harden beyond eating.

Last year’s purpled sage goes brown and larkspur brittles, thin seed pods rattling at a boy’s errant ankles.

As if coyotes belong to some other creature’s dream, groundhog trundles along an old hotel’s vast turf, grazing the dawn.

Doors open and close, chipping silence off the drought-gold grass.

Wings beat brass against the gutters. Secret shadow-scraps for hidden hatchlings.

Muting heat.

Bumblebees tour the milkweed in the same direction every afternoon. Glitch in the hours.

Straw heat, itchy hay heat.

Unsmothered, somehow, volunteer phlox surges thirstless into the sun. Welcomes the nectaring silver-spotted skipper. Beckons the jumping spider and its meticulous face down from the naked clematis. Invites the clearwing hawkmoth—proboscis curved like a pea shoot tendril, furred green and claret body plump as a manzanilla olive—to stain its window-wings fuchsia, viridian. Calls the hummingbird, unanswered.

Withering heat.

Catbird moans into the dusk. Suspension.

Where to place the fulcrum of these long days? Toward the spicebush swallowtail, cool black-backed blue at rest? Toward the yellow dog nosing the useless yellow field?

We are nothing but a rushed scumble over high noon’s country.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of three chapbooks and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, TAB Journal, Southern Indiana Review, Superstition Review, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Massachusetts. Her website is carolynoliver.net.