We walk across the snow,
The stars can be faint,
The moon can be eating itself out,

A tiny creature moves
through the tide pool, holding up
its little fortress foretelling

Not frequent, the monitors of doomed pastoral
admit these native moths their autumn rising

after a sleepy eviscerated summer, stubble
suddenly alive with beakiness, and then and then . . .

Sunset in the valley,
which is still sometime away

from “official sunset,”
this inland of an earlier

nautical twilight;
but at the fastigium

of the dead central limb
of a York gum

at the southwest corner
of the red shed,

Sawdust soaked in kerosene,
storm-fallen wood, ash-flurries
over the stoked bed of a dead fire.

Like monks tunneling into desert
mesas, a vibrant hermitage surrounded
by a moat of sand, rats have tunneled

As a stunted woman (you might say
stunt) my body is every day
ready to explode in some crazy way.