We became adept at maintaining the well.
Each day the trees grow taller.
Some of them rustle. Nothing
too complicated. Nothing arranged
before with giving directions.
Water inscribes a cold inside harvest.

The layout settled—all the while
flown and cropped, then heeded
—bled letters. A mound was smudged.
Behind, a violet fold in ether
finally catches up with the emptied

reservoir. It's dangerous to leave brambles
unattended in the wild, you said
drawing down the lamp. A gnat
crawled out of an old pillowcase
in the hallway closet. A touch

of being in going out, it doesn't stop
falling. To the benefit or detriment of the worm,
at the end of the last day
of the long harvest, a haystack
of shadows floats down the well
never to be seen by the living,
the dead, and the yet to be born.

__

The hidden causality of daily and seasonal repetitions, absences, flipping through old notebooks, handwritten letters, Blake's cut worm, moving to rural Kentucky, staying up late and getting up before sunrise, the capacity for syntax to induce a pleasant suspension or delay while evoking awe and foreboding through the imagery of remoteness, Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst.