Green eyes gazing.

Early sun slanting through the trees, and now every new leaf is a point of light. Sun a caress on the backs of my thighs, another staccato beat somewhere high in the treetops, pecking.

I wish I could paint this so that you could understand.

Snail shells by the creek bed in the mud, some inhabited. A mushroom cap, a rolled real of plastic: ephemera of the forest floor. And everywhere, that little green leaf that heals.

Rustle in the leaves and out hops a sparrow, fat brown bird in the undergrowth.

Hunger.

Leaves like slender fingers, furled. A closed hand around something precious.

One tree by the bicycle path covered not with leaves but with brown seed pods the size and shape of diminutive shoes. As if a company of elves had camped there overnight and left nothing behind but their slippers.

The smell of this pen’s ink, the ink I wrote with a dozen years ago at a slanting writing desk in my parents’ house.

How lonely the books seem when seen though library windows. Left stacked on shelves, not even filed in the rush to quarantine. I long to enter, to run my hands over them, to comfort them.