Take Hampstead High Street before dusk,
then left on Downshire Hill, one block until
St. John’s Church where you'll veer to the right,
follow the narrow stone-flagged walk
to Wentworth Place, gated and locked for renovation
for much too long now, but still you must come
because it happens on this street—the living year, the year
of the great odes—the blue darkening turns fluent
with birdsong, everywhere their notes
become like cursive crisscrossing,
inscribing the air, ancestral
nightingales—they have taken up his song.

—Andrea Potos

My six-year-old daughter stares into the purpling
copper sky and names it dusk, a just-learned word
she is happy to declare, comparing it to evening
and afternoon. We talk of how the earth turns away
from the sun each night,
a motion so encompassing,
our bodies cannot know it.
I don’t tell her how the child
part of me still disbelieves it—that this globe
actually spins while we breathe, while my daughter
changes invisibly before my eyes,
her infant body submerged inside her
with her toddler waddle and her four-year-old skip,
each swallowed within the other
like the nesting dolls she keeps
on her new desk, each self
perfectly preserved, forsaken
for the one that must come after.

—Andrea Potos