Bent over coffee, the fox still inside your ears, you busy
your fingers sifting dried eggshells on the kitchen table.

In the aftermath of a breakdown, it’s hard to explain
why it happened. You keep waking into an anxiety

and then suddenly not. There’s a quart of milk
left on the counter, a hammer at your elbow,

a pigeon in the house. We climb to the flat roof
where frogs gather around still pools after rain;

we stay out until the brick cools, talk about bread, muscle
memory, how bad the mosquitoes will get this year.

How the grill disappeared from the yard today, mysteries
like that: Bobby carrying thirty pounds of rice five miles

from market, psalms pasted above doorways, Bliss’s bad habit
chewing wood fence, fifty frogs on a second-story roof.