It steals Chaucer’s sweets showers
heavy
with April fruit and springtime liquor,
pivots
the axis by small degrees
that
tells us where we’ve been and where we go.
It
hides the turn toward the long side of the sun
with
fizzlers and rockets’ red glare,
gunpowder
lilies and rainbow liberty bells,
false
freedom from death and the coming snow.
Picnic
lunches and volleyball are such an easy sell.
Heavy
with lotus and beer and afternoon naps,
we
sleep and slide into the steep curve
that
takes us where the leaves begin to turn,
color
popping silently this time around.
Canterbury
is empty of tales, no pilgrims found,
no
zephyrs to usher in the hunt and hounds.
We
live by Kepler’s laws of ellipse,
we
who survive by fire and wheel and bone.
Potato
salad days under the blister of sky
blind
us to the frozen lakes of December
as
well as the more obvious “My God, why?”
The
solstice witch is dressed in miniskirts and tan,
the
succubus who steals our seed for Celsius.
July
is green leaning into brown,
a
siren song of summer, the Acme Whistle of a clown.
Let
us leave it at that.
Mow
the lawn, drink the lemonade.
Dawn,
who leads the parade down Main Street,
can
do nothing but twirl the baton, strut,
and,
in the fullness of time, drown.
~William Hammett
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