Summer Solstice
I wanted to see where
beauty comes from
without you in the
world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of
northeast meadow,
my pockets filling
with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in
the brightness
and body of every
living name:
rattlebox, yarrow,
wild vetch.
You are the green
wonder of June,
root and quasar, the
thirst for salt.
When I finally
understand that people fail
at love, what is left
but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of
the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul
with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story
right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is
still so much
I want to know: what
you believe
can never be removed
from us,
what you dreamed on
Walnut Street
in the unanswerable
dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on
your own.
Tell me our story:
are we impetuous,
are we kind to each
other, do we surrender
to what the mind
cannot think past?
Where is the evidence
I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits
the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in
their plangent emergencies.
There are violet
hills,
there is the covenant
of duskbirds.
The moon comes over
the mountain
like a big peach, and
I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say
the night we rushed
North, how I love the
seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go
into yourself,
calling my half-name
like a secret.
I stand between
taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass
rose
to help me live
through this.
Here are twelve ways
of knowing
what blooms even in
the blindness
of such longing.
Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with
its set of pink arms
pleading do not
forget me.
We hunger for
eloquence.
We measure the
isopleths.
I am visiting my life
with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant
with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on
their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me
come back
whole, let me
remember how to touch you
before it is too
late.
Stacie Cassarino
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