Those mornings, after you'd gone to work,
I packed boxes and taught myself to name.

Red-bellied woodpeckers wore checkerboard wings,
and tufted titmice sang "Peter" three times.
Mourning doves shot from the fence, wings whistling,
their low coos from the pines, needles shuttering like chimes

of light. Dragonflies and red wasps looped through the air,
and every time I tacked another signifier to its signified,
a spider would sidle across the patio, faster than
centipede grass quivers, too fast recognize. I think now

that's why spiders frightened me. There's too much
to lose through the needle's eye, and I'd only looked
when it was time to leave―hornet nests like mummified
faces from the eaves, clover whispering up our calves, weeds

thick as saplings. Barn swallows that dipped and flapped,
dipped and flapped, between the high trees at dusk.
A porch ceiling's worth of crane flies. We were two breaths
among millions―and I was nearly breathless. Evenings,

I sat outside facing the dogwoods and honeysuckles
and all the plain, unfragrant trees I hadn't learned to name
until night like a tide took the cinquefoil's last flare.