Snow trees, and still leafed yellow. Ghosts just in from their season. Someone says something about the sun, why we’re spinning, someone falls asleep on my lap, curled like a folded seedpod, not yet broken from a stalk. Like a lamb of Tartary, unblossomed. For all of those years, I was doing so well: be the numb husk. Keep those kernels unfelt, like Puritan corn. And my new goal: never say anything to anyone about feelings ever. I’m sorry I made anyone think about my feelings. Now that my episode is abated, the links linkable, ready with the prepped notes feature, hoping for a cure, I think they’ll all sign up for my course in depression and anxiety. Again, what? Just making a syllabus. Or maybe stranded in a dark crevasse. Or a planetarium, a field trip. No joy sprouting from forgotten seed. Not impeached like a bad president. Whatever kept me awake, in someone’s eye, a whole galaxy on its side, projected above me. From here it looks different, doesn’t it, like a bone spur or some madness I found glimmering when hope was still a boat on a horizon of some foreboding novel, the sort I admired or some line from a long epistle, when I believed in something, smoothed, on some spit of land I walked once, made of ocean stones. We hurtle into climate change. We hurtle toward ourselves, the children gasping. See these new creatures, before we fucked things up. See these tiny octopuses, how melted the ice, how overcome the coastlines. Or I may have been a Victorian meadow, destined for the plow, the erected building. Perhaps I reminded you of a Hopkins list, dappled, like those spots that spring morning, already disappearing beneath their mothers’ tongues. Now it’s fall. Or winter. I cannot tell; the trees are confused in their bud scales. The child sleeps on my lap, the stars spin above me. They didn’t have what we have, so they made things up. Here is Ursa Minor, her fur coat of expired matter, blazing toward us. She doesn’t even look like a bear. You have to work really hard to think of her as a bear.