Over and Over Stitch

Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms hold still for just a moment longer. Nothing looks satisfied, but there is no real reason to move on much further: this isn’t a bad place; why not pretend we wished for it? The bushes have learned to live with their haunches. The hydrangea is resigned to its pale and inconclusive utterances. Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less. The tobacco leaves don’t mind being removed to the long racks—all uses are astounding to the used. There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven— noon, for instance, or all the single victories of gravity, or the kudzu vine, most delicate of manias, which has pressed its luck this far this season. It shines a gloating green. Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind. Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies marking a stillness we can’t keep.