Buried at Springs

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like a delta with a melted base. Sandy billows, or so they look, of feathery ripe heads of grass, an acid-yellow kind of goldenrod glowing or glowering in shade. Rocks with rags of shadow, washed dust clouts that will never bleach. It is not like this at all. The rapid running of the lapping water a hollow knock of someone shipping oars: it’s eleven years since Frank sat at this desk and saw and heard it all the incessant water the immutable crickets only not the same: new needles on the spruce, new seaweed on the low-tide rocks other grass and other water even the great gold lichen on a granite boulder even the boulder quite literally is not the same II A day subtle and suppressed in mounds of juniper enfolding scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump— stands shadowless in an overcast of ripe grass. There is nothing but shade, like the boggy depths of a stand of spruce, its resonance just the thin scream of mosquitoes ascending. Boats are light lumps on the bay stretching past erased islands to ocean and the terrible tumble and London (“rain persisting”) and Paris (“changing to rain”). Delicate day, setting the bright of a young spruce against the cold of an old one hung with unripe cones each exuding at its tip gum, pungent, clear as a tear, a day tarnished and fractured as the quartz in the rocks of a dulled and distant point, a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings in a kind of lope, without breeze enough to shake loose the last of the fireweed flowers, a faintly clammy day, like wet silk stained by one dead branch the harsh russet of dried blood.