I want to kiss the space between a man's thumb and fingers. Out in the light, terns plunge through blue weather, sky a balloon of blue fluid. The moving tide fills waves until a last one arcs up empty and drapes a rim of foam at my feet. Wetness shines there. I burn in the heat, petals dropping onto sand.
Rain clicks on tin, creating time, minutes in a row like garnets knotted on a sturdy thread.
She believes a rose turning in its moment of near perfection does exist apart from its dead self, the mat of rotted petals like a hole stabbed by crows in the side of a dead raccoon, crows that remember and seek the dead heart. When a car passes on the gravel, their beaks return to the blood before the splashed water flattens itself. To the woman the rain on the roof sounds like frogs she hears marking their need for each other, ticking, awake when she is awake in the night. Most mornings she lifts a dead frog from the pool with the rescue hook. In the night, blue light rising out of the pool charms the frogs from their muddy slough.