Letter from Midsummer

Posted by Dave Bonta on June 24, 2009 (last modified at 4:33 pm, 7/5/09)
This entry is part 16 of 17 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

Dear Todd,

I wonder what air
& daylight mean
to the boletes holding
their brown platters up,
or to Indian pipes
with their white
swan necks?
I guess it’s dissolution
that they’re after
here aboveground,
where you need
some kind of hide
or cuticle to hold
the darkness in.
They’re hoping for
a fetid breeze or
brush of insects—
whatever they can get.
Just now, sorting laundry
fresh from the line
in my warm bedroom,
I reached into
a black sweatshirt
to turn it rightside out
& found the evening
coolness hidden
in its sleeves.


Series Navigation«Letter with May’s Insatiable Hunger Tagging AlongOur Forgetting»
Filed in Greatest Hits, Letter-poems, Nature/Ecology. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.Print Print

8 Responses to Letter from Midsummer

  1. sarah b says:
    June 25, 2009 at 6:30 am

    Lovely – several images I especially liked: the white swans and the platters. But my favorite surprise was what you found in your shirt.

    Reply
  2. leslee says:
    June 25, 2009 at 7:20 am

    Very nice.

    Reply
  3. Michelle Johnson says:
    June 25, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    Great poem. Especially liked the coolness found in the sleeve. Refreshing. Have a nice day.

    Reply
  4. Laura says:
    June 26, 2009 at 12:54 am

    These are great… I hope you know how I look forward to them!

    Reply
    • Dave says:
      June 26, 2009 at 11:26 am

      Thanks. I think Todd and family are away on vacation right now, so I don’t think he’ll respond with quite his usual alacrity (though I’m sure it won’t take him as long as it usualy takes me).

      Reply
  5. Dave says:
    June 26, 2009 at 11:31 am

    Thanks for all the comments — and sorry for the sluggish rate of posting these days! My brain doesn’t work well in summer.

    Reply
  6. Bluegrass Poet says:
    June 29, 2009 at 10:45 am

    “My brain doesn’t work well in summer.”

    Really?

    So many skins in this one.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

URLs are converted to links, and three or more links in one comment will cause it to be sent to the moderation queue. Constructive criticism is always welcome. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Smorgasblog

    • Metaphors for the Moon
      Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
      of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

    • Cleaning My Attic
      Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

    • Clumps and Voids
      The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

    • botanizing
      On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

    • The Twitching Line
      My uncle, gutting a fish:
      removing the fins from either side,
      tipping the knife below

      the little anus, pointing the tail-
      end away, slitting it to the gills,
      then plunging in a hand

      to scoop the organs out, soft
      and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

    • The Ordinary and the Wild
      I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

    • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
      So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

    • Chatoyance
      And on the other side, what I
      set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
      a crease scored in bent blades of grass
      where I forgot the wall stood,
      my footsteps blurring as the
      grass unbends.

    • Velveteen Rabbi
      There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

    • Will Buckingham
      My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

  • Read more (Archives)

    Subscribe to Smorgasblog

  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
    — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

`