Unbearable months of almost wishing you could disappear, and then one day the brush of a small wing; the lilt of a new voice in your ear. Indigo shadows and their gradual altering. Lunettes of color, tentative on the periphery— like vegetation coming back after a fire. Or a woman with a red coat walking in the fields; her red umbrella. You know the world is still a pandemonium, a ship- wreck, an intubation. A mausoleum of seemingly incurable slaughter. And yet at the edges, a blue ripple threads itself like a stitch through arms of willows, sweetgum, and magnolia. At day's end: the light, closing again but not like a wound; pleating, like a fan.