Something shaking me. Asking me to come back to where it’s summer. New trees are shooting up through the clotted lawn around the house. It’s time to get up.

This voice like code, speaking from the frequency of early June, where the tilt of the earth is opening sealed jars of preserves and spreading the microscopically sexual prongs of pollen. An unwieldy drama, full of betrayal and gasps of tears, is unfolding just outside. Or just a party where drink has led to a liberating breakdown of the miseries of détente. Regardless, time to wake up and prune back the encroaching woods.

Or else live out the thickening season in a heaving bramble. Spend time in the forest of an unsanitized fairy tale with the bewildered children and devilish hag. Breadcrumbs, each one a seed that grows into the Ark. Clouds of crows heave around the sky. The animals two by two march into the stoves. Days or decades later the ashes stir and out climb the Phoenix species, the refined essential rat, parrot, guppy, and camel, stripped of the demands of evolution. Jellyfish shine with intelligence, perceiving the complexities of ecosystems in a bright flash of resurrection. All the animals throw off their flesh and leave it beside the campfire, where the miserable tribes of men find the cast-off cloaks of fur, slime, scales, and feathers. They hide themselves in the costumes they find here; some of the refugees don the chitinous exoskeletons of the cockroaches, others climb inside the slithery skin of amphibians. Here and there a bear rises clawing the air in wonder at its new strength and simplicity. Their inventions fall from their paws. A violin splinters beneath a shiny hoof. Music and religion and economics are abandoned there at the campfire as the new race of refugees skulks out to fill their world with their animal cries, to run and hunt and fuck and burrow out their days in the abandoned, choking gardens.