#august quartet

[therisingnight]

Untitled (Drone)

heavyeyed cicadasong lulls me. raindense august heat cradles me and I curl in:

chatter and hiss.

white clouds wafting, brushed soft by sunbeams and washed by waves of heat.

my eyes halfclose. I hold my breath.

the sleepless thick air of summer nights turns to whitehot noise in daytime:

hung chords, no melody, all sung all summer.

there is so much afternoon: cool evening breeze never comes.

close harmony kept in chime and hum.

molt and make merry all summer and sing while my heavy eyes lie on horizon lines:

chatter and hiss.

[therisingnight]

August Quartet

I was adrift in August of 2021: the heat was oppressive, there was new illness in my family, I was in a collapsing relationship, the pandemic stretched on and on, and I had the constant, wretched feeling like I was waiting for something.  I was never sure what.

There were so many cicadas that summer.

I wrote several poems around that time that touched on one or another of all those feelings.  Four of them came one after another—numbers 59 through 62 of my many, many un- or merely half-titled poems—and they spoke to one another.  I spent most of that following September editing them, and they grew together in my mind.

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.

[therisingnight]

Untitled (August)

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.

[therisingnight]

Untitled #60

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.

[therisingnight]

Untitled #59

Over drinks he says I’ll seize  summer next year—but listlessly,  like he barely believes the year  will run so red again, or like

the ice in his glass is an omen for the rest of his life, slipping into stillness and silence ’till not even a shadow remains. 

Winter will draw on the pith in his bones till he’s taut, and tension will send him spinning into life in half-light.

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.