august

(a study on summer in the dead of winter)

If memory was a month, it’d be August.

Damp light falling through the hemlocks. A washed out sky crowded thick with felted clouds and the sound of a motor boat humming.

Do you remember? I fell down the concrete steps, lakeside. We dead-headed red geraniums in the window box while mosquitoes bit at our wrists, ripe with watermelon juice and the sunscreen we forgot to apply.

In this memory, I’m always laying facedown on a leather seat as the engine pushes us forward

into sunlight.

Water lapping up beside us, eager.

We’re cutting through the lake’s center

Charlie Mountain.

Night Owl.

The big water.

A gas pump and a Klondike bar.

A puddle of oil staining silvery rainbows into the water’s surface

wrinkled with ripples

Effervescent.

We look at night crawlers in plastic tupperware.

We tiptoe over hot asphalt, nearly numbed by the loud heat of the noon-day sun.

What was it you said about August being the sunset of summer?

What was it you said about honeysuckle, bougainvillea, snapdragon?

He’s lighting up the grill and charcoal is wafting through the late-day haze. I’m drunk off the afterglow of heavy sunlight and a slice of poundcake. Licking rock salt off the ice as the cream churns. Peach skins. Summer squash. Cole slaw.

We’re shucking silver queen corn in the shade of a mountain laurel.

The hammock is rocking itself to sleep in the warm breath of an afternoon breeze.

Can somebody turn up the volume?

It’s Sweet Baby James.

It’s Summer Wind.

Can somebody make sure we don’t hit the walls of the boathouse on our way out?

It’s nearly nightfall

It’s nearly the end of this memory.

We cut the engine. We float, unanchored. We take cues from the boat, swaying beneath us.

We know it’s a dance, and we’re dancing. We’re turning circles in the waterproof carpet.

We’re watching the color crowd to the horizon and then empty out behind the mountains.

A fire turns to embers, turns to ash. Turns a cool blue.

I comb through knotted hair and count my bug bites.

Eight.

Someone somewhere is turning on their porch light.

All I can hear is the sound of cicadas and the motor’s hush-hum.

A conversation behind me that’s getting lost somewhere between my body and the breeze.

And the water beneath us is churning into to black ink

in the dark

our world transforms in mystery and moonglow.

Can you separate the pine from the memory?

The smell of the fire burning?

And we’re drifting forward.

And we’re going back home.