I write all the other names in dust but deeply I only believe in green and speak it as if it is a separate species. It grows like a lettuce left to leaf as if it is a five-year-old whose favorite food is light. In a million years there may not even be air, but green says not to grieve yet since so many stories are willing to start, so many fathers and mothers maneuvering to be meaningful. Green gets underneath and gets its gases everywhere, and once it wears a window into the world, that is the length and the strength of its logic.

Down the hill from my house there was a ledge where old water sat for a long time, gathering its thoughts, and then time collapsed it under and the upper waters went off chasing the skirts of the glacier and left the rest as you see it now, the long shallow lake filled with drumlins and prehistoric poodle-eating pike like the one we saw jump out of the bay to grab a squirrel off a low branch. At the base of the hill, mink and muskrats left clamshells in the cave where I sat as a kid with scraped-up legs, feeding my face to the white and blue morning glories that grew out of the rocks and made me a witch because I was just as stony as the stones, and just as stubborn as things that for ten thousand years had been rooted right and tight. In fact, I was frail because I was a bit gaudy. But still I come to life after every thaw.