—after the painting “Christina’s World”, by Andrew Wyeth

Last summer I walked on
someone else’s ground.
I strode tall, grown. Shin-deep
in crickets and shirring grasses,
meadow high on a mountain
and the sun so bright.
When I was small, and the world
was flat and hot and the house was gray

with death, I would crouch at the edge
of the yard and the forest,
bundle myself in warm skin and chlorophyll,
ears open for the end:
there is a particular rhythm to the
silence at the end of rage.

The ferns and rough St. Augustine
grass that was so good for whistling
still flexed, unsafe. Tremors
flicking the green. She
looks thrown. Our worlds
sharp and bright, and always that track,
always the threat of someone
coming back.