Such a nice phrase, dropped off, like my fantasy of the Kingston Bridge, of just standing on its ledge, the upstate wind buffeting me, the mighty Hudson reclining against its banks like a friendly blue-green dragon, waiting. How hard could it be to simply decide not to think and step off into the thin infinity that nevertheless feels more substantial—in the imagining—than whatever invisible future I supposedly have in front of me. The erased chalkboard of the rest of my life. A black background and then just swirls of things that have been taken away. My dog, my house, the ducks, the trees, the paths through the woods, the beautiful calm shelves of the study, all those books alphabetized over one long summer month, a letter a day for twenty-six days, surrounded by dusty pages and covers, getting more and more excited as I worked my way around the room. The red barn with the stall in it, the one where along the back wall various bottle ends were mortared into the chinks so a wavering colored light shines through just at a certain moment of the day, like the bottles and jewels embedded in the Arizona bathroom. The crocuses that refuse not to come up even though it’s a cold-mud-and-bitter-rain spring, and the fence, with its wonky leaning against its own physics, here and there flattened, getting set back up on its feet each year so it can yaw and go akimbo again, the turtles and the foxes and the inexorable raccoon, making his way through the pond reeds at night, looking for what he can find and pull the head off, drink the blood of. The fisher, a crazy mammal, and the possum who stares into my motion-activated camera like it’s a mirror. My studio with its aerie feel and its carved wooden flowers along the beams, its bent copper lights and its view onto a makeshift golf course, the haymow, the wetlands where the painted wood ducks swim in circles, the geese with their khaki babies each spring, and the hawks who sit in the tall trees and stare down. The heron. The bobcat. The dogs in their graves.