Tonight you'd toss every pinecone into the cove if I let you. Bedtime, I say, hoping you protest. I lean against the fence, swallow the ache that you will not remember this. Nearby an evening dove, if that's what you call it, longs for something. Proof animals are doing fine without words.

I lift you over the fence back to our side and set you down, look out at all the pinecones you've thrown, the slow tide arranging them in a gosling line, ushering them out to the vaster bay in a sort of iambic trance, lub-lub, lub-lub, like poems from the womb.



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