The day is indecisive. Hot sun, big rain. It is a long, slow summer. In the afternoon, I cut a gladiolus from the back garden and place it on the kitchen window sill to encourage me by beauty when I am doing tasks. The never-ending battle with fruit flies.

In the garden, I crush, savagely, every earwig I can find. They have feasted on the leaves of sunflowers which bloom despite the lacework bitten into their green. One fronts our living room window, reddish brown and taller than a human being. Such a strong stalk for a flower smaller than I had thought. I lose the battle with what I'm told is quackgrass, tenacious, spreading under loam as fast as I can find it. Each day, though, a new discovery.

Yesterday, a revisitation: the poems of Pablo Neruda. Humbled, I open up new works, offer one to you:

landfall

Why do I need a secondary process translation to find out what I, myself, am thinking? Jan Zwicky

a wind: zephyr, chinook, mistral, call it what you will. breeze,
waited scent, wafted. blown. who has seen it?

ill wind, come with wind, or gone.
we try to leave land, then return:
sea and air, our temporary homes, abandoned on a whimsy.
charade.

seeking discovery, we find no answers
in tall catamarans of our minds.
like flying fish, landborne birds,
we spin wheels, tilt windmills
till next apocalypse.

it’s a breeze: draft, breath. Who breathes? slow
currents compose to gales, angered gods whistle,
propel blasts through constituent parts. oxygenation.
a petal drifts through heat haze of summer afternoon
hotter than hell has ever been.

a distant promontory, a mirage. all our senses
shift to cardinal directions. we watch birds soar
as land is sighted, light upon it wishfully.
homecomings are not for strangers.

how do we name? language borrows other places,
sundial turns to shadow. butterfly wings cause tidal wave.
some small miracle, somewhere, longing sailed round islands,
sun and wind. global warming.

restless denizens in each firmament chase seedlings
along chaotic pathways. nothing is random: no maps can find location.
predestinations. gentle prestidigitations from quiescent gods:
a new garden, a tree, leaf blown, a sail.

dervish twirls a dance, no demons follow. land ho, he cries,
and there, truth of windfall. sand. ephiphany?

something true is known. we feel that much, twirl again, skirts
lifted to umbrella air, sea creatures bound for planetary credenzas,
aloft like helium. endure, tarry,
remember invisible space, immanence.

a sign of someone coming.