August 30 2009 Sunday

Today doesn’t feel like Sunday—the stores were open wherever I went, the sky bright, and I bought a pair of shade and a steel rake for a pittance (because plastic tynes do not perform as well on unmowed lawns, which demand teeth, steel teeth, to pull up the hay). I lose my shades routinely. I can’t keep a single pair for more than six months at a time. Then they’re lost or broken or misplaced, or the lenses pop out until I find a half dozen lenses in the wells of the car door, all dusty and cracked, the scalloped layers of shellfish still sharp. They go like windshield wipers or vacuum cleaner bag. But I can’t go without sunglasses for very long. Some aging starlets conserve their remaining beauty by avoiding the sun entirely, as if they must travel incognito among the populace for impossibly attenuated periods of time under canopies of banana leaves, umbrellas, or straw sun-hats, sans floral or fruit decorations balanced upon cones of filigreed wire, but some of us, mostly hoi-polloi, mind you not hoity-toity, must wander through life with our heads exposed to those vissisitudes of weather that would drive the most patient hermit-monastic to extremes of behavior unheard of among the lordliest surviving ecclesiastical orders in the western world. Land-O-Goshen: the sun peeps from its hideout of parted clouds. Of the news you might say there is so little you couldn’t place it in a thimble-sized container for news, which is a manner of dismissing metaphor albeit in a rather hectored willful style as if our author wished to actually prove not merely competence but virtuosity as well among these vocatives, exclamations, embellishments, and diminuendos, as if her were desperate to secure an audience, having lost rapport with them once, determined to clutch them fast to his heart once again, an uncertain occasion for which the clouds appear to break before the sun hides behind their flotillas once again. The news was neither bleak nor did it promise. The news was incomplete—only a slice of it appeared at the collectively designated time, too much to ignore, too little not to say with Chou En-lai far too soon to tell.

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The mistake was to wake far too late to use the morn to advantage,
but the dew is dried from the grass enough to mow. Mow, sleepyhead!
Otherwise be grass. The grass will engulf you in silky strands.
Are they not pleasant to the touch of bare feet? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,
what golden nugget can you extract today from the dross
of the common tongue? All demands to be written, not read.

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The passing of interstate traffic, the buzz of cicadas
In the dead branches, the shadow the weathered fence makes,
The birdhouses nailed on the fence without birdfeed, tendrils
Of wild grapes climbing among sugar maple saplings as they graze
The corrugated roof in the shed’s rear, a recollection
Of town lights extinguished by midnight, the winding
Of Wells River among wetlands abutting the public golf course,
Spiderwebs bearding the wild grapes bunched on tendrils
That twine among finger-wide branches of maple saplings,
A broken pallet, one waterlogged and lichened, leans against the rear
Of the shed beneath the shade the saplings and the grape vines make
Even in the middle of summer at the peak of day, with the sun
In the meridian, all pistons running on the interstate,
You might intuit all travelers make the destinations they intended.
Some straggling perennials, some garish flowers wilted to their stems,
Spiky weeds that break loose concrete, grass-blades among
Marble chips in the drainage, thankfully the motion lights
Remain off with the arrival of dusk—only domestic cats
Criss-cross the backyard searching for cardinals
Or song-birds perched above in the branches of a dead willow.
The rusty corrugated shed roof on which they land.
The peak heat of the day in which the fruit would ripen,
The blush upon yellow deer-apples shot with worm-holes and a brown blight,
The brambles shorn of their blackberries bow on the edge
Of landscape, the whole town terraced and built on tiers—
Who will dive from the steel bridge near the furniture mill.

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