Low

It’s not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.

It’s a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
pines.
There’s a couple.

It’s a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet

between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.

The cups and saucers were still.

Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other’s face as a backdrop and sometimes

the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,

in which they are walking.

It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn’t softened.

One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
reflections in the windows

made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
walk under branches.

-Arda Collins (from The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)