It was a summer under glass. Summer in a snow globe,
shaken dapples of sunlight instead of flakes.
Summer, fragile on a knickknack shelf.
The birds seemed animatronic; cock of bead-eyed head,
every wing ruffle, contrived. Artful contrails swirled
across my windowed blue. An arrangement of cumulus.
Piped in: the drone of lawns that mowed themselves.
Clover and boxwood, glossy but null. Scentless.
Red dirt unturned by worms. The ozone tang I craved
was merely an anodyne to dissolve upon the tongue.
The curtains billowed only because I breathed in and out;
the minutes beat because I held my fingers at a pulse point.
My skin was as white as bone-colored January. There was nothing
but this day and then the next one. At the end of each, I tallied
with a tick mark to show how far from myself I had come.