#i'm coping.

The cut-leaf coneflower, the goldenrod, the black-eyed susan, full of bumbling pollinator mouths.

The green of the world straining a bit, bowing in peripheral dryness and photosynthetic hunger to the increasingly short days and cooler nights.

The cicadas, insistent buzz defiant, but a marker of time's passage all the same. The decreasing number of fireflies.

Summer's coda. I keep my arms open to the cool, shadowed melancholy of autumn, but I weep for the uncompromising sublimity of summer. My lover, muddy river-soaked, the air unbearably full of water, insects and leaves and the searing eye of the sun.

I know we still have several weeks before the declared astronomical end, and yet: August, my companion... Crickets and muskrats in the water, and ripening tomatoes, and iced lemonade, and the ambient smoke of campfires.