Summer Song (2004)

What now unsheathes
is summer, long and fierce,
the season which plunges us
into the daily embroilment
of heaven and earth,
calamitous, fulsome, sexual,
spent. I came south on a
dream of surfside women
with arms and breasts to
soothe my over-wintered
shape. Of them I found
far fewer than I prayed for,
and so I became their
inmost singer, alone at this
post far from their savage-
sweet day, each foray here
finding them all on islands
the surf combs like hair.
My song has harrowed me in
a South far more martial
than I once believed, the sun
ripping bloody from the sea
and sprouting wings of
hot angel ire, burning the
near-naked bodies which
sprawl on the beach, drawing
every bead of sweat and juice
in one evaporate sigh. I
heard that music a
continent away, pinned in
a room still glazed with
winter. “We are of the sun,”’
wrote at that hour,
nous sommes du soliel,
words I chanted in box
of frostbitten charms,
singing to every empty
space I knew she filled.
Brown child of summer
in my dreams, I swilled
my rhythms south till I
came to sit in this chair;
and sing now of this dark
so soaked from last night’s
rains & ripe with all the
sun will soon enough bid rise,
syllables of moisture
in a lush verduring sea,
poems I hurl skyward
til thunder sings back.
Up and down May’s
heavens rouse and heave,
too bright and feral for
us to try on our own.
Dermatologists and jailers
reap their fill of all
who bare to much come
summer. I’ve paid my
dues -- plunged errant
and wild long enough in
far pools, held a pillow
fast over my head
in terror of the light
shrieking from the
perimeter of a window-shade.
Believed too much, and
not at all, joining every
Icarus falling from shine
to abysm. In the blasted
suburbs of my South
sprinkler systems pump
an emptying aquifer
to keep St. Augustine lawns
a pristine, holy green.
But I am far away from
such backwarding tropes.
My green’s the algae bloom
of lake jammed at its source,
the sinkhole dammed
with an old Datsun 710
which careened of a hot
road and plunged all
the way down, my mouth
filling up with lake and
murk, bossa nova on
the radio shorting out.
Every day now come summer
the sun hauls me up
and out, still dripping
from that strange dream
which drowned my embrace
and washed my verses clean.