…while another singular,
irreplaceable species of warbler
falls into twilight, into extinction. I think,

I am in love with that bird:

with all the fleet and perfect sweetness of its final song on planet earth.

Tonight the sun is setting red
while I am saving seeds.

It is winter, and your presence is requested.
In the winter, when it’s time to go
deep, deep inside yourself and find the stillness,

This age-old waning of the sun
has come for eons over this same view:

Mountains slowly smaller over millennia,
the sun, by fractions and particles,
smaller too. 

all the tiny silences
that have made up, thus far, the giant silence of the universe.

I don’t aspire to tirelessness.

Let me sometimes

come down
to rest.

The land belongs solely to itself, and we belong to the land, all of us here beneath the wide-brimmed bowl of sky.

No one gave permission

to the last mushroom of the season

to be this plucky,

A canny one, the desert. She knows how to call my name.