Ok. Ok. Enough.
Yes, it’s bloody hot
Hot as blood and as sticky
as the slow fatigue
that leads the brain
to rot.
But it’s time to reactivate the heart
and mind
and get down
to that act
of staring into space
where the idea hovers
Empty
Waiting for that sensing
To awake
and touch its stings
sounding the words
That sing it into life.
The insects were creaking
their own song
in the hills
The ever singing trilling
that was constant background
to childhood heated summers;
The sound of thickened heavy
summer air, itself, singing
Punctuated as it was
by the sharp buzz
of mosquitos in the ear.
The parenthesis months
full of swimming pools
and summer camps
in memory, so clear:
But here in another land
Another time, their name
escaped me
As names have escaped my mind
for the millennia of my time
There was that void
Round,
filed with silvery nothingness
into which
something I might call
consciousness, seeped
Floating like a furtive fog
Catalyzing the nothingness
To create a somethingness
like the chemistry
That pulls crystal out of
seeming emptiness.
Urging the space to congeal
like the smoke of
skywriting in that
summer sky
Sending the airplane in
To spiral through the vastness
Miraculously leaving behind
a white trail
becoming, gradually,
a message
as we look upward, spellbound
to a blue celestial
space.
As in those long summer days
of playing in the sand
and lying on a beach
filled with children screaming like gulls
And adults lying as still as they could
In the sun
The message took a slow summer
eternity to unfold
waiting for just the moment
when I looked away
and the high breeze
nearly blurred it all and took
away all sense.
I caught it,
though it nearly
melted in my hand
and I named
this game
Cicada Files,
one of many cases
to be filed in some
Department of the Memory,
Missing,
Actively pursued.
And now each time
I sit to write and
court that drifting flight
into moments of absorption
so complete
Gazing off into that distant void
Distilling from some sacred spot
the drop that will
disperse the fog
And leave the word itself
alone
Hovering, dissolving slowly
in the blue,
until all words disappear
and leave us the intensity
of the light
I hear that buzzing
background sound of
summer heat
and those lazy days
of boredom
destined never
to repeat.
