Sketches of Next Summer

Sketches of Next Summer.

I was in the garden with my metal detector
when I heard a muffled ring beneath my feet.
I dug and found a telephone, dirt-encrusted

and ringing, and brushed off the receiver.
A voice asked me how I found the phone
and I told him. Was it hard to hear, he asked.

Not on a quiet day, I replied. She must have
been ignoring me all these years, he said.
I’m sorry to bother you. I won’t call again.

An early hour in which I notice dogs
lounging on the lawn like sphinxes; also sprinkler chatter,
the chirping of sunfed bugs. Some soundtrack
to paranoia putters in the basement, chained.

A later hour in which I wonder:
Why are shoes fashioned from the shoeless?
It’s an odd thought, but not as odd as others
that might arrive later from latent minds.

The landscape is a skillet of coffee shops,

every waitress named for a gemstone.

Soused, she couldn’t suss the rhythm

and the night roared on in its flammable way
while she wept upon the windowpane.

What next? Only hours before she held

him and swore an oath to detachment. Now lost,
her stomach was empty as a lunchbox, her heart

bleated from within its zippered case.

In the park, a door in the statue
opened and three people in Victorian dress

exited. They looked around uneasily
at the sunbathers who took notice,

the startled chainsaw juggler’s audience.

“This won’t do,” said the woman
with a whalebone umbrella. “This won’t do

at all.” They returned into the statue

and the door shut behind them.
For a moment after, there was the question

of whether things should continue

as they had been before the intrusion,
whether to spoil the day with comment.

But the juggler paid little attention, counting

each finger of each hand until he was satisfied
to have escaped the scene unscathed,

then collected his armory and left.

The heat, enough to crack glass,
dried gutters to old testament gulches
and there was violence in everyone.

The bees built their hive until the hex
was held in honeycomb, hidden from us
in their headache machine. We waited,
so certain of damnation we didn’t notice
the season carried on without us, leaving
us forever stranded in the solstice.

There’s so little I’m scared of now.
But still so many ways for fear to find
you and even more methods for love.

On the corner, that house we watched
burn down is filled with birds and bits

of burnt furniture. We toss coins
into the wreckage for good luck, carve

our names into the blackened trees
that surround it for ceremony.

It’s later than you think. Already I can feel
the Earth shifting its axis, bearing us back

toward winter. I could walk all night.
We should walk all night.