At dusk funnels of frayed rags whirl from the barn lofts, bats pouring up to feed on summer mosquitoes. I shoot a white lariat of hose water; it loops my cabbage garden. My daughter fires hardballs at her mother who catches them in a piepan leather mitt, thwock. Later, my wife is saying how hard to love all things, hard to take the sense of fleas or the cottonmouth that blinded the little girl out Route 9, near Bonner's Black Angus farm. Crickets roar. Silent lightning. Downhill, the bloated creek crashes in its channel. In the Union cemetery on our property, beyond the north pasture, in a windbreak stand of ash trees, each mossed tombslab, (there are seven), leans for a soul perfectly forgotten.