and the new day moths flutter like gracenotes, taxidermied
by the little pins of evening light, and we still flinch inadvertently
at the leftover church sermon, the prayers still chapping our lips. this late
in the summer, the tallgrass is dry and muzzling, whispering cradlesongs, their
wheat-heads pinching the sunlight, and the wildflowers turn
away and dry, like milkless mothers. you sit on the porch
reading from the bible, not outloud, but under your breath,
about lot's wife, and sodom and gomorrah, and I can see that your
freckles are coming out again, a test positive for
the upcoming thrum of deepest summer.
teapot shadows, and the old fruit clinging to the trees like suckups
leaking, shriveling, dislocated, their pits dropping like genitalia. the day
push-peddles its final stitches of light, the final appliqué
of shadow and glow, the final inseamed embroidery, as sounds of
children screaming and laughing come from down the street,
and the thunderheads anvil on the horizon, white and huge and
faraway, like the memory of mother baking in the kitchen,
the flour a laughing gas around her, slamming her knuckles into
great upset stomachs of dough, and singing, singing
dad brings out the hand-cranked ice cream maker, and we take turns
stirring it. we pour rock salt on the ice to make it colder, and you
smile and say that these might be chippings from lot's wife's hip
cooling our ice cream, that slops and slurs inside its metal capsule.
the mourning doves reckon and sigh, mother's blossoms nod in their
snoring pews, and the cows in thresher's field call to each other incessantly,
a frantic pastoral echolocation, as the sun slopes and you close your bible,
and come help me pick blackberries for the ice cream, red and sore and secret as
girls maturing, plinking into our tin bowls –
the true sound of summer rain.
Good job, as always.
