Monday morning you woke up and backed into a bad mood
while moving your sedan from the bank parking lot
 
to an empty space across the street. You slipped
on pre-dawn ice; then the car stalled. Twice.
 
Despite below-zero temperatures you overheated
from punching the dashboard till a teller
 
wrapped in jumper cables rapped on the window
and rescued you. Back home, burned-out,
 
you pulled into bed, while I drank espresso
in the kitchen, idling high, planning my getaway.

On leap day came rain and mud
and swaths of daffodils
 
on the forest floor. Long before
the season of languid heat set in
 
to grease my shoulders with sweat,
I ran before dawn like a night-horse,
 
darkness erasing my weight
and gravity. I flew to road’s end
 
and over the black ribbon of
trodden dirt leading down to the river.
 
Thirty-some-odd years ago, suspended
in the sky, I said,
 
Remember this moment,
and even saying that, leapt beyond
 
the moment to my now-self remembering.
I told myself,
 
This morning is perfect,
but in thus speaking had to nullify
 
a hundred numb teenage nights
recorded in a journal.
 
I crinkle the page. Empirical memory,
graceless and hard-shelled,
 
crumples into ecstatic flight.
My quick breath fills the pockets
 
between footfalls. I dash through
the yellow-spangled ground cover
 
to the log that spans the water
and cross over at a canter,
 
aware that I could easily tumble,
knowing that I won’t.

The mouse in our house is a rat,
lugging stale pita across the floor
like a shield,
 
slipping inside the stove
all scramble and scratch,
ignoring our Havahart trap.
 
She’s a cookie-crumb snatcher,
a crack-of-dawn raider,
a mad-rodent hausfrau,
 
a twisted bedmaker who
turns art to confetti
and scatters scat in fabric,
 
that shred-happy
ghost of nested futures
sent to gnaw our drywall to dust.