Summer
BY CONRAD AIKEN
Absolute zero: the locust sings:
summer’s caught in eternity’s rings:
the rock explodes, the planet dies,
we shovel up our verities.
The razor rasps across the face
and in the glass our fleeting race
lit by infinity’s lightning wink
under the thunder tries to think.
In this frail gourd the granite pours
the timeless howls like all outdoors
the sensuous moment builds a wall
open as wind, no wall at all:
while still obedient to valves and knobs
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs
expounding hope propounding yearning
proposing love, but never learning
or only learning at zero’s gate
like summer’s locust the final hate
formless ice on a formless plain
that was and is and comes again.
Conrad Aiken, “Summer” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1953 by Conrad Aiken. Reprinted with the permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
Source: Collected Poems (Random House Inc., 1970)
Summer
BY HEATHER CHRISTLE
Today you find yourself guilty
as the rim you split
an egg against
You press charges
You spell out your name
like the letters are medals
for good conduct in a bad war
The night moves in with you
into your room
until even your sleep
is not your own
Through the window
the grass tells you
to give up
and you are trying
but on the other hand
things keep you:
the moon, the cars, cars
You undress yourself
more deeply down
like this is the way
to get to the future
You let the darkness
medically examine you
So much can’t be
put back together
To burn the house down
to burn the house up
It’s the same problem
in any direction
You’re matter
You turn on the light
Source: Poetry (October 2013)
Summer
BY JOANNA FUHRMAN
The host's girlfriend is barely seen.
She's busy giving away
wild animals to reluctant guests.
I agree to take a snake-dog,
maybe an electric eel, but when
I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder,
I start to worry about
the future welfare of our fragile cat,
the precarious order of our rented home,
and remember
I am supposed to be looking for someone....
A half-wolf, half-elephant
cracks through the walls
of the peeling wallpapered bedroom
where my former student
in a fuchsia robe and curlers sits
by a lighted make-up mirror.
The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark
as the branches of an evening tree.
The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost
transparent,
like flute music or an idea.
I turn my back
and finally, I spot her
my friend, the host.
She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass;
her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing,
and I don't know what to think.
I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades,
and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but
then I remember
the cancer won,
my friend isn't actually
here, there is no party,
there was never a house.
Joanna Fuhrman, "Summer" from The Year of Yellow Butterflies. Copyright © 2015 by Joanna Fuhrman. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.
Source: The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015)
Summer
BY CHEN JUN
TRANSLATED BY MING DI
The swinger the swirler the swirled: stop grieving.
I drink all night but in a diminishing appetite.
The scene outside is obscene from a humbling window.
My sentiment spreads, my famine a flagpole, a grizzle.
Birds sing next year’s songs, or antique rescues.
I write but where shall I send it?
Let go — I shall go tie the flowers the leaves the whole orchard.
The outskirts are curved, shadows of countrywoman donors ...
You bring me a cup of fresh tea that I love,
I return you two kapok leaves — like hand waves.
Translated from the Chinese
Source: Poetry (October 2017)
Summer
BY CYNTHIA ZARIN
for Max Ritvo
I
Three weeks until summer and then—what?
Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin
each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through
the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine,
fin de siècle, fin slicing the water
of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver,
then receding as if we hadn’t seen it,
sultan of so long, see you tomorrow.
Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal
who swims too close—too close for what? The needle
swerves. Our element chooses us. Water
fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus,
hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s
bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters.
II
If I could make it stop I would. Was it
the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time?
The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon,
glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces.
In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King
his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year
on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays,
why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one
hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s
paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach,
its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales
of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering,
its metronome time bomb tsk tsk—
when is giving up not giving in?
III (child’s pose)
When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get
smaller, or did the world get larger? In
the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue
roses, white stained red—adolescence
is to overdo it, but really? Thirty
stories up, our birds’-eye view is
the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head,
wings beating, too tiny and too big to see,
your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones
daring the air, marionette running on
the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’
freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet
holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change.
Let me go from here to anywhere.
IV
That’s it for now. And so we turn the page
your poems standing in for you, or—that’s
not it, what’s left of you, mediating
between what you’d call mind and body
and I, by now biting my lip, call grief,
the lines netting the enormous air
like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s
spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch
“as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts
and catch on air.” Pace. Your trousers worn
to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip
prongs barely holding them aloft, the past
a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking
at before and after, but there is no after.
V
Or is there? For once, when you rock back
on the chair I don’t say don’t do that,
forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air—
Every departure’s an elopement,
the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles,
spoon mirror flipping us upside down.
Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights
blazing, when one light goes out they all
go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny
crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter
branches a candelabra for the spiders’
silvery halo of threads. What a terrible
business it is, saying what you mean.
Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.
Cynthia Zarin, "Summer" from Orbit. Compilation copyright © 2017 by Cynthia Zarin. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Orbit (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017)
Image source: Paintings by Samantha French
Poems source: Poetry Foundation
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