The Substance of Summer

At night by the yard's edge
The colors are muted and bushy
While I wait for fallen leaves to repeat themselves.
I turn in the wind and rattle,
Shaking against the blur just past dusk.
I can remember well the flavor of Magnolia
From childhood slumbers.
After heat and drought where green things
Won't get wet, the smell lingers dry
As my insides without marriage.
I can remember the cry of black birds
Out near Bud's porch.
The colors of their cries were twilighted,
Sweeping over my road and boughs of hemlocks.
But back down on the ground, I hear not a word,
Only night time murmurs
Like leaves about to die.

The Reddest Days

The large-leaved day expands itself
and opens a familiar spot at nine a.m.
I wake familiar with my dissent
and my desire at once distracted.
Red after red after red.

There are troubles unspeakable
in my small bed.
But under the paternal flame
I am quiet as to overestimate
my role a Good Daughter.

Infancy each day is not enough
in lives here, though it used to be
a feat to live, but has since woken
some sad beasts. So when sleepy eyes
pierce the physical fix of things
I'll be dangling around here still.
Don't doubt it.

Examination of a Failure

From this I will evolve myself.
It is my trouble, the old work
Rearing up in dust bowls
Like something out of Bronte,
Wispy and leafless.
To know balance finds me no rest,
Not even the herbs. And now
I can't get high as before.
What will come of me?
This town, it's inescapable.
To think quietly at such a distance,
To think and be heard is unlikely a pair.
These are my bad points,
The large, unruly dreams.
It is my inability to perceive without certainty
My own inexperience.
The stoop I can't seem to leave, this room.
The no vacancy and the trains I hear at night
All go without me
Like old friends I've let go years before.
Of what these secrets become
I am in spite of myself.
Now, in the fourth years of these married
Decades, I have no contentment
the curse be it all people like us.
I think art and life here is
An apotheosis, my one illustration of being,
The hometown cornerstones and cinema showing
The captured woman am I.
I suffer, but quietly like 'us' do.
And everything, every morning becomes Summer
I do not enjoy,
The sequestered nights spent calculating
The coward who'd shed her envious pain
To be numb.
There was once an illustration of this
In which two things compared
Had tight resemblance to the other.
It's an odd place where I matter
Only when in love.