An inveterate list-writer, at the end of each day, I’m often summing what I’ve done. Somedays, my hands and my hand seem to come up empty. Or my heart has articulated a question.

I pass a few days drinking coffee and talking with my daughters, walking through the woods, along rivers and streams and a rock-throated gorge. They’ve teased me for years about my focus on the gritty and hardscrabble, my fascination with wandering into abandoned cellar holes, my curiosity about abrupt turns in human stories. But when has the world ever not been falling into pieces? There’s this, though: surely at times the world’s misery spins harder and swifter and unbearably more painful.

In those cellar holes, gardens of flowers and sustenance once bloomed at doorsteps, their seeds dormant in the soil. Sunday, nearing dark, I brake for wild turkeys meandering across a dirt road. There’s no one around. I pull over and walk down the road to snap a photo, but the turkeys suddenly rush, hearing my footsteps, and I’ve forgotten my phone in the car anyway. I’m at a driveway that bends up the hillside, the house of out sight. Many years ago, the man who lived there offered me his dead wife’s fur coat. He must be long gone, too. I’ve long since lost any sense of who lives there now.

“Matins”

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

— Louise Glück