The poetry in a heatwave
This is the time of year when fall has never felt farther away even as it comes closer — and closer, and closer — each day we manage to survive the dregs of summer.
The sentiment here does not apply to summer lovers. I see you. I respect you. But I don’t understand you.
Give me autumnal gloom and the deep freeze of New England winter! But summer, I know, is essential in appreciating the eventual seasonal changes, and so I write summer poems. This sun-swamped pause, weirdly, inspires.
The “lune,” for those who don’t know, is a poetic form that was devised by the poet Robert Kelly as a variation on traditional haiku. In haiku the syllable count is 5/7/5. The lune has a syllable count of 5/3/5. I’ve written at least a thousand lunes over the last 20 years — I love the extreme brevity and quickness of a form that aims to contain time.
In the domain of the poem, a moment might as well be an eternity.
Heatwave Lunes
the air is its own
animal
breathing through the heat
*
summer rain, I write
the sound down
in long sentences
*
daylily beaded
with rain I
watch evaporate
*
lost in talking, we
both notice
the sun’s almost gone
*
no loneliness when
the poem
keeps night company
*
blue humid dawn fills
the vacant
vase in the window