#august quartet

chatter and hiss.

I’m in a better place than when I wrote them, or at least a more interesting one.  But they bring me back to that moment—the heat, the hope, the longing, the listlessness, the chirp of so many cicadas.  They are become a unit to me, a little family in verse.  They belong to one another.  I have given them up to you, one after another, in their season.

Don’t tell the girls blowing bubbles  in the garden that summer will end.  Let them go ’round the lawn, sunburnt  (but somehow, for now, still green, though I feel that change in the light,  and that telltale shift in the color  of the heat as the days go on— not quite as long, but enough).  At least the nights haven’t swallowed  the cicadasong or crickets’ chorus.  At least the apple orchards haven’t  gone red and gold—not yet, not yet. Don’t tell the girls going golden in  the garden that the summer, too,  grows old.

The raspberries fall to the floor and you curse  your shaking hands.  The summer’s gone sour: the nights creep closer and cooler but it’s too hot to believe.  He says: honey, feed me roses.   He sprawls about the bed and the ceiling fan tousles his hair.  You feel your stomach turn but you tune it out—tend instead to the hunger, what’s left of love.  He kisses seeds out from the gaps in your teeth like he believes, but when summer goes slick, sticky, black with bruises, you pray he might give it up.  By now the sun, too, swoons and sweats rays, run ragged from rising so early through these hot, long months.   In time he, too, will give it up.  For now, though, raspberries stain the floor and you remain and the summer stays.

For now, though, he is waiting —for the next round to come, for the heat to break down, for the towers to chime, for the city’s cicada-heavy center to hum, for the letters to arrive, for his lovers to unspool at answer-phones, for the plums to come ripe in the cupboard, for the Sunday drivers to rumble their roadsters along,   for the suntan girls to go down into their backyards and bare their breasts, for rain, for breeze, for enough of the day to pass that he can give it all up, saying, well, so much for all of those plans, and he heads home and lies back opencollared in August heat and drinks deep of his own patience.