Liberties

(Amy Clampitt, for you) Casual. Flitting skin off cucumbers over a wide metal bowl, catcher for the harvest from the summer market, that cosmos of virtue — jug bands, frailed banjos, picked mandolins, tomatoes as a toddler sees them, mitts of stars — I feel a comet trail of shiver where my sternum is, that bone high-school posters flat out to a Roman sword, but dug up horrors prove as dropping bombs. I know it’s nothing serious, which worries. I’m known to be pulled along and flipped in fuguing wake. It’s good this happened at the sink, at evening, with time before the white flock orchestra descends the grass drifts through the shrub maze of picknickers and their pickneys on Tanglewood’s lawn. Shed bound! Music in hand and jaw muscles; the old estate spellcast as something sacral near Kripalu’s mount where stone hips cleave. I’ll be there in the back with maples oaks or birches, X-legged with Txakolina for as long as I can bear, cut jeans on the blue quilt gifted by a poet from Oaxaca to embrace my then small children when I wasn’t home and here I am not home again, months here in this cottage in this rumple-range terrain, summer homestead of phantasmal ease: Shakespeare by starlight, Martha Graham’s wraithings, mill blood museums, high-priced downward dogs, and all year, inns in mansions, British-eyed manors, valleys with asemic oratory patterned with what private cars elided from Manhattan — big gauge rail. Once, I swashed about a bend as if in winter on a sled, found origin: a high rock face bird-ferned, no kerb just bushing then road so thin my silver comet must have singed that low stone fence stacked with logic like dry wood, marker for the sheer fall to an olive river chilling twenty feet