New Hampshire

The bear sleeps in the cellar hole, where pine needles heap over the granite doorstep. And the well brims with acorns and the broken leaves of the oak tree which has grown where the anvil rusted in the forge.

When my eyes close, I can see another summer: a bark of rust grows on the trees of the gas pumps, and the EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow cellars of diners, and a wildcat waits for deer on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees meander among raspberries, where a quarrel of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.