Sunlight falls through the square window into the water of the inside pool and is reflected onto the blue wall above it. Ghost-handkerchiefs, whiter at the folds. When I create a wave with my hands, the view disperses, as in a blizzard, but soon, the fluttering squares return. I could say that when I’m gone, I’ll come back to you like this, talking to myself the way the soul does. If that is true, then whose soul is this? Sometimes I can sense death coming and it is white, too. A name that enters, disturbs the field as the first butterfly might. Mourning Cloak with its velvet tippet, its golden hem. There are the two-by-fours that hit us in the sensory world. And the medium approach of evening, shuffling in the pines. There is the differentiation of colors, louder for the painters. When I wake at dawn, a low-grade fever of the mind, and go out on my porch to cool it off, the spider web I don’t see until rain strings its beads. Or the dead, who wear the softer hands of the living.