We arrived in the heat-thrum of summer
without warning, two young towheaded aliens from
the land of housing projects and junk yards
lengthening days wandering, seeking out box turtles
and toads, garter snakes, plucking fat shining ticks
and the dark tongues of slugs from our sunburned arms
and legs, setting out on small, rickety boats, each
painted a different shade of ever-peeling blue,
puffy orange life vests smelling of must,
of those thick, watery seasons long since passed.
In the winter months, the school bus sometimes
could not get through, and the snowplows were slow
to find us, scraping their stubborn way up that
narrow curve of road to our small scattering
of cabins barely visible, the deep-frozen lake on one
side and the deep hibernating fields on the other,
furrows grown hard as gravestone beneath.
The small black-and-white TV was mostly snow
as well, only one local channel's signal strong enough
to reach our clothes-hanger antenna, giving us
the news we could easily see for ourselves.
The weighted sky hung low, the white earth rising
to meet it, growing closer from all directions,
while all else in the world became hopelessly far away,
our lessons for the day stretched out before us,
waiting to be written, before the early fall of dark.
