Summer Haibun

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light
 

Copyright © 2017 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 7, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

May

This is a love poem. It has no business.
It happens in that anyway world 
Where the bodies are by now decided
To get all the way up, accompanied
By changes in temperature and light
Welcome and unwelcome both,
Lie down, get up, go prone again,
 
Get nowhere in time. I won’t
Reduce to a single preposition 
A relation to the one person about it 
Like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name,
Three or four even, which globe, 
Without containing, her experience,
Of which I chase awareness till  
 
Her letters are with one exception
All over this deepening sheet, name-
Blind blue of a cloudless day. 
Unconcerned with property disputes,
The poem gradually permits itself
To figure grass, the blue of the sky
Because we see those first kinds
 
Of immense quiet as sleepers
While walking the dog in the hills
And store them for future use
As simile and metaphor, each 
ancient and suspiciously free 
Of present disaster. But today royally is 
Blue and cloudless, this blue, this 
 
Unironic absence of clouds over green
That makes you temporarily more
Intelligent, makes time harder to track
Until it seems it’s always been
Only this pleasure somewhere 
Between hours in the form of a bell
Melting mid-ring. The poem’s now
 
Broken one of its rules in order
To keep ringing. Because I want to
Be smarter than true it continues
To disobey the trace of my injuries,
Remembering home is not a place
One at all leaves or gets to
But supremely anonymous
 
Relations with rhythm, a fragrance
Where skin meets time on which
No pronouns fall, here in the presence of.
Not lasting but repeatable and
Each of the instances claimed
For the series, belonging with the ones
That came before it, the others
 
Still to come but not in doubt,
Yesterday moving on top of tomorrow.
If blue were an all-day affair work 
Didn’t tear us apart in, but held
As shape and song, the anonymous one 
Playing on repeat, referencing nothing but
The very red distraction I attend to
 
Where bed turns each afternoon away
Along the suede sound of good decay
There’s still plenty of time to invent,
None of it spent in advance, then,
In intuition of every day to come, 
The flowers lasting for more than a week,
Blue growing down to grass, 
It would be like this.
 

Copyright © 2017 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.