Pursuit of the Peach

Everything’s so delicately balanced –
and yet hauling heavy bags
of trash down seven flights of stairs
in ninety-something weather’s

partly what I had to do today
to keep my play aloft and swaying –
damn, I love the heat. Everyone
complains about it: I think it’s a treat.

Moving to a new apartment in it
makes you feel that after all you might
have found the beat: you know
that you exist. Though there’s a twist.

Sweat and danger give the heart
a hiss and fizz – but wholeness is
a peach which will not grow and ripen,
plop into your hand on cue because

you’ve sweated for it and it is your due.
Sorting through the paper bundles
of my family today I scraped away
at memories which tore at psychic

skin. I still can’t haul the photographic
stash of them and throw it in a bin.
I guess that I am no less routed
by a grim catastrophe that seems

to loom behind the sweltering
enormity of life than anybody else
I meet. Everything’s so delicately
balanced. God, I love the heat.


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