Poetry was the subject of April’s blog.
Spoiler alert - same subject this time.
The month of August inspired this pair of my poems. The experiences and emotions led to one emerging bright, and one dark.
Kind of like this year’s August.
21st of August
The ideal hour
of the ideal day
of the perfect season.
When iced-up time returns
this August day will too,
bring back
torrential flooding sun,
dammed only by leaves,
bitten all to holes, by
blitzkrieg bugs of summer.
Last wave of an assault
launched in April,
marched onward
through June’s sugar snaps,
joined by beetles that ate July
until August arrived, with its
explosions of lawnmowers,
hedge-rapers, grass-slashers.
Sound thrashers all,
though none so intense
as a flower, for instance.
Observe a Rose of Sharon
as it traps the pair of manic bees
deep in its roseheart,
besotted, beside themselves,
upside down from such sweet nectar.
Epitome of simplicity?
There is nothing so complex
as the full moon of an August
on the planet of high summer.
EIGHTH MONTH
Hunkering here, in the Jersey Pines,
braving insect kamikaze
beside a marshmallow ready fire
sparks another fire’s light,
beside a tent at summer camp.
It was a way station
from a world that had me cutting, at not-quite-ten.
It was the Fifties. They were paper dolls,
smiling folks, to sort to file,
families to set in tidy piles,
until the sweet, clean breeze
of other possibilities
blew through that August summer camp tent.
Segue,
to suburban Saint Louis.
I am twelve now, savoring watermelon-sliced recall,
snugged in a paint-globbed Adirondack chair
between August dusk and August dark,
aiming before spitting teardrop seeds,
hoping against hope to hit a firefly.
Dissolve,
to Lake George, upstate New York, the August Maryland died.
The morose Monroe news came crackling through
pine-pricked Adirondack air.
It reached the splintering dock where I heard all about it
on my turquoise plastic transistor radio,
treasured thirteenth birthday gift from
the crazy uncle
who took tokens in the subways of New York,
with nothing but his diabetes for company.
The uncle who told outrageous lies
About transporting surgical teams through the Holland Tunnel
as they plied their trade in the back seat
of his large, late-model Buick sedan.
The uncle my mother hated
to have come for even the briefest visit.
Another August.
I am 30 when my mother,
clutching her leaves-you-breathless Smirnoff in one hand,
and her toasted Lucky Strike in the other,
dies. To add “by fire”
would bring my hunkering to a screeching halt.
Better by far to pierce another marshmallow,
hoping against hope it will not blacken. Bubble. Burn.
