Crisis never stands alone like a box of crackers on a shelf. Each disaster, every birth has context, like anchor points of a spider web bedazzled with dew, each stray cat’s cry, a neighbor riding his bike, the barking chorus when I walk through the back alley to mail a letter, a bill paid with…

Morning news like splinters, witchery words that curdle milk, guns again in the wrong hands. One or two cancers cured, nonagenarians run marathons, clear ponds feed mink and otter, water relieved from stink, yet disease blooms in the body politic.

A benevolent tree breathes. Silent leafy lungs shade me, sharing music made of shaped air, words in their Sunday clothes, but the sky wears a distant haze. Wildfire taints the air and I breathe in from the contiguous sky over us, in us. We inhale and exhale danger.

Earth turns my face to the sun, one drop of light in the cosmic soup, a churning pot of stars, boiling. Spin please a little longer for me, my muddled mind and skinny soul thinking I matter, too often dead to morning’s bright blue, fierce orange . . .

a novel by Barbara Kingsolver At her desk Kingsolver makes space on the page for a man known only to her, gives him a place in time, and he, in turn, writes the span of his life, making it available to you and me. Go there, open hours to read, a lacuna in your day.…