This year, the summer has arrived early.
The light, for example, is burning my cheeks at midday already.
And the fig tree’s fruit are swelling fecund with sun-milk,
pregnant with it, so that nectar drips
sweetly through the skin of each perfect berry.
Also, the dogwoods are in peak bloom.
The branches: wide, wedding cake tiers, frosted thickly
with brilliant white flowers.
The blooms last about six weeks and gradually fade
to pink, giving a long season of color.
I think they look just like paper.
The ocean is warmer too,
so that the children at the beach can sit in the lapping tides,
inspecting the sand for unnatural glimmers:
Shells, glass, the like,
and you. Your eyes also are beginning to glimmer
unnaturally at this time.
Thus nature conspires to please me.
Yet this year, the summer has deepened me
so that when a wind blows east, my toes
root stubbornly into the coolness of deep sand
and they resist. They are resisting
in that futile but spirited way
a young willow on a soft embankment leans
and leans before it falls. The same way
you comfort a fussy baby when you are not her mother,
the same way
you hold yourself.
This year, I find myself wishing the season would delay a bit longer —
wishing the ocean a bit colder, and the figs, a bit greener,
so that I might believe that time is not so dispassionate to me.
Only in the summer, it seems possible to appeal to Time like this:
“Won’t you just make a small exception for me?
I have never asked before. I have been very good!”
For only one moment she holds me in her sympathy dnd
then she forges on.
She does not look back at me a single time.
I am left watching the dogwood blossoms gradually fade to pink.