A soft rain of pollen drops in our courtyard—sun lights patches of patio and of grass—a green insect like an aphid walls up the notebook page, over the landscape of these words and over the page’s edge and into an unknown and unfathomable outside where words like these can never go. Someone’s AC unit rattles irrelevantly from a second-story window. Some orchids purpling in a big blue pot. This is a spot outside public space with no interior to call its own. A bird whistles down the breeze as evening wings its way toward us; evening, the earth’s self-swallowing shadow.