They told me there’d be pain
so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk
that looks out glass doors
onto the browning garden—plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain
so violently they drain it,
the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song
on the long way south still,
and our dogs
out like lights and almost
falling off their chairs
freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me
to swell, slow down, carry me out
of all this almost
to a where
about as strong a lure as love.
by Elizabeth Arnold