A Taste of Summer

Never found a real home for this piece. Well, a small internet journal, but not a permanent home.

I wrote this at the Beginning of the Affair. Sort of reminds me of that poem by Carolyn Kizer that details a month seeing someone...and then it was over. Well, this was three years, so I was feeling no pain and the living was easy in the summertime:


LITA SORENSEN

As perennial as the grass

—found phrase (from The Desiderata)

returning each year from brown rags

so are the strobes of the heart
each perfect plum or dulcet berry
A ripening.

Does spring know it shall come this far
or does she hesitate further
bowing willows on river banks?

For feeling is a burst we may sometimes fear
and then grow slowly to want.
The petals open as single words. Leaves fold into thought.

These are not questions for chance but for exquisite reason
and they lay strewn like Cyrillic
markings among the greediness of summer.

There too, is doubt pronounced in the
slenderness of stems, so distant in their connections,
holding the heavy heads of flowers above rain like new milk.
They have seen nothing, touched nothing but sleep bent in memory
of a voice grown dark, soft in meanings
the lateness of the hour closing blind eyes
across lands, across highways, across cities.

Endlessly
summer morning open, bring with them
a drowsy furor; whole small countries of their own making, of dreaming
fine dreams with strong desire in open fields. In clarity, in light, in rented rooms
and beyond this,

all as if reason for care, when sun shines through trees again.