Where Were You?

“Where has the summer gone?,” you ask.
I ask: where were you? Damned season’s kicked
my ass – takes me to task each dawn and noon
and dusk and night, insisting on its musky self when

I show signs I might enjoy attending to the barest
whiff of something else: operatic and unwieldy,
not the sort of thing you miss: glaring, pouring,
boiling to a hiss and froth, now doping me with

onslaughts of late August sloth: luring me outside
on such a sunny slide – such a perfect promised
opportunity to bask – I don’t see coming up
the sides that I am headed for a pelting bath –

I purchased three emergency umbrellas I did not
expect to need: not to mention those few afternoons
I thought I’d cuddle up and read – when suddenly
the skies went black and passionate and spackled

their electric cracks all over my perceptive
apparatus – indiscriminately making brutal love:
peace! – all the sordid sweaty grease you lease
by living through this smack-down in the city –

please! – an itty-bitty-bit of fall – this rumbling
summer will not stall for anything – that is, until
I sense the sinking sun – notice in the early
morning, early evening that the park across

the street is dark again – summer inadvertently
has lured me into thinking it would never end.
Something in me wants to lengthen – reaches….
Wonder how much longer there’ll be peaches.


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