We were told start trying give it a season you’re both healthy. I was not looking for a new way to measure time but there it was when the fourth season came and went near the end of the year
and the clappered-shut days seemed to block any latent hope latticing in through the trees.
Some months it was the sting of failure like a hard slap when you aren’t paying attention but
mostly it was pure animal, child. How I was already addressing you hovering on possibility,
perhaps never to rise up into the magnitude of a pronoun. And who was dropping such things
from the sky? Small white egg intact but for a pinhole. Empty nest under rotting leaves. What creature wouldn’t scavenge the forest for love, wouldn’t meditate on the endless knot, so much
like the inside of the female body. We released five koi into our pond, wrote a letter and left it
beside a Buddha in the mountains. You wouldn’t believe the grace that carried us into the sixth
season, child. It wasn’t elegant or laced with surrender, as we were often told by doctors to do.
It was the kind of grace a barred owl uses to fly into the head of any person walking near her
nest during mating season.