This precise hue of orange, that I imagined
to be an odd angle of light, refracted
from a lost dwarf planet, somewhere,
is nowhere

to be found, here, where my cat’s bones
wrapped in a towel under the grassless drape
of the black walnut tree, summered clean
sunken

among the detritus of last year’s living, leaving nothing
to glean. Even the squirrels, fierce and foolhardy,
clambering mercilessly in the branches, keep
unholy

distance, as if they could sense, with a fine quiver
of their whiskers, that the hole in the spectrum
was a tunnel hurtling vertiginously toward
collapse,

as if all that we ever thought came forth, posing
in the briefest of stills as light, bone, leaf, torn
from the stumbling dream of the dark, pried wide
open.