I Wake to the Half-Light of the Milky Way

and stand on the balcony, listening to deer
step through the crisp of dead leaves.

Behind me, the dream.
Your body asleep in our bed. Above me,

a river of half-living, half-dying stars,
Now the stony knock of a falling acorn.

Now my knot of terror at losing you.
Once we hiked into these hills

to a ruined homestead. Moss and vine
and bramble. House as rumor,

a few fitted stones, a fallen beam.
It was late afternoon. Red on the gold hills,

sound of a river we searched to find,
but it was just a breeze

moving between leaves.
I remember we undressed

and lay down
inside the hieroglyphics of shelter

that meant finally nothing
could hold us, your breath

on my neck, our bodies binding,
unbinding in sunlight.

---

Julia B. Levine’s many awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in anthologies and journals, including The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Nation. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press) was published in 2021. She lives in Davis, California, where she serves as the current poet laureate.