Passersby

[rejectomorph]

Thrown askew by another unexpected departure from my schedule, I lost yesterday afternoon to shopping and then lost the evening to an unintentional nap. The heat had something to do with it, too, I'm sure. The smell of dry grass and the yellow haze filtering the summer day's last light are soporifics. Even the sound of Portia romping about in the attic couldn't overcome my torpor. Don't close your eyes I told myself, but when have I listened to sound advice?

I woke with a midnight breeze whispering in my ear. The air was cool! The delta breeze that began creeping into the valley a few days ago has finally reached this far. Today the haze has differentiated into wisps of thin cloud with feathery edges, and the breezes make the leaves and flowers dance, flickering bits of sunlight about. I might be able to avoid another nap. Summer's more than naps.

White stars still hide most of the jasmine hedge's green leaves. Down the block, a big oleander bush is flaunting an abundance of pink blossoms. The rose bushes across from it are producing a new crop of flowers to replace those the deer recently devoured. Crickets in the deep shade of the flower beds begin chirping long before the sun sets, and birds swoop through the spray lawn sprinklers release, briefly disrupting the small rainbows the finer droplets have captured from the late sun. How could I sleep through this? Soon enough it will be gone, and I'll regret every moment lost to inattention. Look at those woodpeckers, making the best of the passing day.




Sunday Verse

Vacant Lot With Pokeweed

by Amy Clampitt


Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing—and look! here's

a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

with all due respect to amy clampitt, i like the poetry in your post more than that in her verse.

[rejectomorph]

Thanks.

As well as for its weedy, summery density, I chose Clampitt's poem this week because I myself would never have come up with that splendid phrase "the season's frittering."