Laundry List: Poems About Summer <3
- allymmmounga
- Jul 23, 2021
- 3 min read
All I can seem to write or talk or think about lately are poems, so here they are:
Bed in Summer
By Robert Louis Stevenson
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Nostalgia (The Lake at Night)
The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter. Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?)— distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc.—their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water.
Summer (a love poem)
BY FRANK LIMA
I wanted to be sure this was our island so we could walk between the long stars by the sea though your hips are slight and caught in the air like a moth at the end of a river around my arms I am unable to understand the sun your dizzy spells when you form a hand around me on the sand I offer you my terrible sanity the eternal voice that keeps me from reaching you though we are close to each other every autumn I feel the desperation of a giant freezing in cement when I touch the door you're pressed against the color of your letter that reminds me of flamingos isn't that what you mean? the pleasure of hands and lips wetter than the ocean or the brilliant pain of breathless teeth in a turbulent dream on a roof while I thought of nothing else except you against the sky as I unfolded you like my very life a liquid signal of enormous love we invented like a comet that splits the air between us! the earth looks shiny wrapped in steam and ermine tired of us perspiring at every chance on the floor below I bring you an ash tray out of love for the ice palace because it is the end of summer the end of the sun because you are in season like a blue rug you are my favorite violin when you sit and peel my eyes with your great surfaces seem intimate when we merely touch the thread of life and kiss 7.30.69
Still Life
We’d often been included in the weather, whose changes (as in the still, portending darknesses of after noon) were hardly evident, if even manifest at all. The August rain over Mixcoac & the deadening of all aspect at a distance: yet our sudden wet bodies, firm swelling divested finally of shirts & trousers, left beside turbid footprints on the tiled floor; this tongue, these lips the lightning over the unchartered landscape of your thigh: successive terra nova to resist the still life of the body
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