.. . These are the last three things
that happened. Not in the universe,
but here, in the basin of my mind,
where I’m always making a list
for you, recording the day’s minor
urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio
shell, the dog eating a sugar
snap pea. It’s going to rain soon,
close clouds bloated above us,
the air like a net about to release
all the caught fishes, a storm
siren in the distance. . .

~ Excerpt from “The Last Thing,” by Ada Limon

Day 4 of our 21-day workout. I wake early, as planned, stiff and resistant, but ready to go by 6:30 a.m. Legs lag. Humid air, like slowly jogging through a wet, wet canvas curtain. But the leaves, they are so lush, they rim the path on both sides, they hang a soft encouragement of greenly green. It’s a dripping day, and a still pond, a surface of peace. Sit. Eyes close, birds begin in my ears and my breath, steady and deep and my mind rippling of my poem for my workshop, and poems I might make, and ripple, ripple ripple. I am recording the day’s minor ripples for you: I break the surface of blue calm, with a gliding stroke and a rhythmic breathing. Charlie is fishing and waiting, fishing and waiting. We walk home through the green leaves. There are fine poems to workshop in my poetry group; mine is so fresh, not understood. It wants time to be new and unknown and mysterious and rippled. In the late hot hot swelter of afternoon, Frank and I and my daughter and the dogs descend the steep path to the dock, returning to the unruffled pond, a tiny bit cooler than the air. It’s my husband’s first birthday without his mother in the world tomorrow. I ask him how he is feeling about that. She’ll find a way to reach me, he says, and I believe him.