Ok. Ok. Enough.
Yes, it’s bloody hot
Hot as blood and as sticky
as slow fatigue
But it’s time to reactivate the heart
and mind
and get down
to that process
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 song that was
the background
To childhood heated summers
The sound of thickened heavy
summer air itself
Punctuated by the sharp buzz
of mosquitos in the ear
The parenthesis months
Full of swimming pools
And summer camps
But here in another land
Another time, their name
Escaped me
As names have escaped my mind
For the millennia of my life.
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 void.
Urging the space to congeal
like skywriting in the 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,
Under pursuit.
And now each time
I sit to write and
Allow the drift into
moments of that
full absorption
Looking 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,
I hear that buzzing
background sound of
summer heat
and those lazy days
of boredom
Destined never
to repeat.
