It is summer here now, And the trees are weaving Their green hats again.

Sunlight dapples the page When the winged leaves move Over a wren’s call and the subsequent silence.

I am meditating on a word, a katydid, Which fell out when you opened A dictionary at random this morning.

…

Since it was in those stridulating pages I sought refuge before, it would appear That I share a preference for things

Heard but not seen, touched but unnamed. Or read but not understood till I am surprised Into summer light, tender green like your irises.

Do you see that leaf over there moving? It could be katydid, i.e., a winged leaf.

Do you know our toes tapping or touching under sheets As a way of listening, is something we share with katydids?

And while I don’t really sing when my hands rub Against yours, when we have kids they will be nymphs!

The histories that we narrate late at night To include in our own Herodotus, full of Facts, and myths, rumors, dreams too, which scrape At what it really was then, like cat’s tongue,

Is what I think of this morning, sitting with My back against an oak tree. Isn’t this how lives Become twinned, so that this in itself becomes later, A tale that will be told by us, or by the ones we may Pass on our lives to, another history to be appended Or concealed in the leaves of a bulging Herodotus?

Morning light is worming through, and someone is in the clearing aglow, Astride a fallen giant, and is drawing light through, as her horsehair bow

Teases metal wires racked on the slender frame of wood, on which follow Last night’s dreams, tapped out and thrummed by her chilled fingers, slow

And hesitant, looking up towards the enclosing shell of willows that allow Only a limited perspective of the sun that has risen in either red or yellow

Familiar notes first, perhaps she is just practicing the scales, fill the hollow, And memory of when her body was only music ripples like a risen minnow

Everything is listening here, few doves, a red headed woodpecker, a swallow With its arced wing, so you too stop and listen to this beauty in making billow

Like the wind you sometimes hear, ear to the ground, as if it is from the burrow From which Eurydice is surfacing, winched up by a single Orphic violin or cello.

A part of the weekly word-scale exercises.