Kathy’s house is a converted chicken coop
on the edge of Towson with turtles or maybe a turtle
and domestic bees if bees are ever domestic.

Anyway, there are hives and a pond with its
proprietary scum. We heave stones in, make
rings of broken water, disruption of the smooth,

a disorder we admire. We believe time is ocean-
wide and hours can be spent like that, skipping a rock
into water, watching circles tremble out

from the center. When our lives get smaller than
the ocean we believed in, more a lake, say Superior
or Huron or even little Lake Winona, we have no spare

minutes to dawdle and splash. We are bees then,
pollen-gathering machines, buzzing, coming
and going, until years seem like Kathy’s little pond,

muddied, shallow, and each day can be encircled
by the plop of a turtle or a pebble and we spend hours
reaching through the pond scum to find a proper stone.