Every night I rehearse for some possibility
of shattering: for the temperature to drop,
for the crops to crackle over with ice;
for clustered leaves, womb-like and whorled,
to heave out their purpling, waterlogged
hearts. It isn’t just ruin: some things
just get heavier with time. Season after season
tunnels into the next, the way a drift follows
the veins in bedrock. Hear the matriarch
shift in her bed, slight as a sheet of dry
tobacco. Indoors, in the stilled hallway, a clock
measures the remaining hours before circling
back around to the beginning. I can think
of sounds to match these constant cinemas
of undoing: a string twanging in a doorway;
crickets; the ivory percussion of bones.