“August, you’re just an erotic hallucination” ~ Denis Johnson, from “Heat”

“Summer” (1896, oil)
by Alphonse Muncha

                    

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.” ~ Violette Leduc, from Mad in Pursuit

Mid August already. Here are two that I had originally planned for Tuesday, but hey, it was #1000, so they’re here on Wednesday (still with me?):

                   

Late August

This is the plum season, the nights
blue and distended, the moon
hazed, this is the season of peaches

with their lush lobed bulbs
that glow in the dusk, apples
that drop and rot
sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands

No more the shrill voices
that cried Need Need
from the cold pond, bladed
and urgent as new grass

Now it is the crickets
that say Ripe Ripe
slurred in the darkness, while the plums

dripping on the lawn outside
our window, burst
with a sound like thick syrup
muffled and slow

The air is still
warm, flesh moves over
flesh, there is no

hurry

~ Margaret Atwood

“Summer Madness” (nd)
by Cy Twombly

                   

“East of me, west of me, full summer.” ~ Charles Wright, from “After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

August Morning

It’s ripe, the melon

by our sink. Yellow,

bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes

the house too sweetly.

At five I wake, the air

mournful in its quiet.

My wife’s eyes swim calmly

under their lids, her mouth and jaw

relaxed, different.

What is happening in the silence

of this house? Curtains

hang heavily from their rods.

Ficus leaves tremble

at my footsteps. Yet

the colors outside are perfect–

orange geranium, blue lobelia.

I wander from room to room

like a man in a museum:

wife, children, books, flowers,

melon. Such still air. Soon

the mid-morning breeze will float in

like tepid water, then hot.

How do I start this day,

I who am unsure

of how my life has happened

or how to proceed

amid this warm and steady sweetness?

~ Albert Garcia

                   

Music by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, classic, “Summertime”

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