Showing posts with label heat wave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heat wave. Show all posts

Friday, September 15, 2017

Break of heat


The air was thick as clotted cream, felt curdled and
pregnant with wet heat. While white and stacked grey clouds
weighted down until pushed themselves into fog,
it was mist.
As hot as it gets, they said, this is it, the tops it can get.
An inferno.
The hottest it has been yet.

A lone human in the dark morning,
no cool breeze finds me, sultry summer lingers
at the front door, breathing heavy, loitering across
the eggplant sky, hanging on with bruises.

Eighty-six
degrees at three a.m.
nothing moved but magma waves
hiss and ess. Yes,
this is the sound eighty-sixed.

Finally, at six, three more hours
the sky cracked, the wind awoke, stirred
and whisked the steam into lemon meringue.
Now the brown edges protrude.
The silence dissolved like refined sugar,
and moments filled with birds and their wings.





Painting by Ercole de' Roberti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Friday, September 30, 2016

Totem poll


The final straw of September twenty-
ninths slit of smirking Black Moon-
the Indians have hung onto summer
with the same tenacity as their water dances
around the fire-I feel-
too long, feathered, and hot.
Sweltering shaded shelters there are none,
and I am white, weak and wrong,
along native latitudinal lines
not strong enough to weather
this Fall-
the pressure is too high to let go.

It makes me want to tear off my clothes
and immerse this blue skin in the sixty-three degrees
Pacific ocean
pacific specifically
calm
cool
collected.
................
September is succumbing to
October who strikes us sober.
Chill.
Breaths like poetry help acclimate me
in worlds like Autumn.





By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

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