On the sixty-degree day in February, here
on a picnic blanket we should not be lying on
under insects that should not have hatched
from the slow creek, which should not be warm enough.
Too big to be gnats, hovering too still to be flies
changing direction abruptly as spaceships.
I’m uneasy because I have no name
for them, don’t know their intentions. They are outliers,
like everything now—lonely line this year draws on the graph,
the sun at the wrong angle to be warm, winter sky smeared
with cirrus clouds no one planned to be under. A man
with a telephoto lens enters the frame, focuses, considers,
then walks on. Wind hisses through the dead oak leaves,
a cold sound, as if we are listening to a recording of winter,
the way we would to rain on a sound machine, to fall asleep.
