There are now six monarch caterpillars busily munching through new leaves of milkweed. We planted the irises which were a neighbor's spontaneous gift to my mother on both sides of the front steps. After sunset, we walked through the nearest corner of the Great Meadows and came out into an eerily affluent development with a faint sense of temporal displacement, especially since we had been wandering trails in the woods as the moon rose, naming our path by gates of glacial boulders and birch trees half-ghosting the twilight. We saw a garter snake at the edge of a hollow so dark under its drifted leaves that I thought at first it was still a pool: it lay under the brush like a yellow highway line and looked at us through the clear buttons of its brille and we left it to its night's hunting. My phone was not at all up to the task of capturing a butter-colored half-moon framed in the branches of a clearing, but I like the drowned blue images that
spatch caught of me trying. He said it looked like some kind of lunar ritual. We found our way home by an old elementary school and
nineweaving sent me Emily Wilson's "Artemis is with us." I wrote a poem about Brauron once. Draw down the moon.

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