Abstract
Large tree, you try on death every winter, how does it feel? A cloud interrupts the faint moon as a small branch falls at her feet, a branch, when held, whose limbs wishbone toward her chest and the space the owl made into its own. Not knowing the way back from forward, she continues the only way she can, her outstretched hands scanning the space ahead, until glimmers of diamond-sized light announce a pond whose surface suspends the fragments of moon glimpsed through the thought of the imperfect copse overhead. Standing at what the little girl understands to be the water's edge, something small and soft brushes against her leg, but she is unafraid when she hears the small dog lapping darkness from the pond, when she crouches to rub the dog's coat along the ribs, when the dog stops drinking to lick her palm with a heavy tongue.