Today we wore shorts and rugby shirts, sunglasses.
We sat beneath a sycamore on an old quilt
and drank iced tea from Dixie cups.
Our socks and shoes got tossed beside the picnic hamper,
the ball gloves, and the kite
as we risked bees about their business in the clover.
Later, we lay as still as possible,
neither thinking nor talking,
while a killdeer cried out in the blue above us.
A cool breeze blew, but the sun was hot.
We got too much sun, fresh air,
so that now you keep nodding off beside me on the couch
waiting for the late movie to begin,
leftover chicken still uneaten on your plate.
A year from now we won’t recall today
any more than other harmless summer days
that passed without any souvenir save sunburn—
days we keep like ticket stubs from summer comedies
that go forgotten in a shirt pocket
until run through the wash and lost.
Photographs of days like these seem pointless,
our early summer legs so white they glow
against the sycamore-shaded green.
When was this? Why did you take this? you’ll ask.
What in the world were you thinking of?
Days that leave no urge
to worry them into sense,
no pain worth poetry.
(Who asks why he was happy?
Who bothers to write the answer down?)
Days when sitting in the sun,
the radio tuned to baseball,
was right and necessary,
and intimacy required no confession
of griefs or grudges.
Days when the only sound
was a killdeer’s cry or
a ground squirrel’s chatter
while we weeded the garden,
our daughters digging in the dirt,
you checking the pepper’s progress,
me watching gravity tug
at your breasts as you bent
unmindfully before me.
Today the kite went up without a hitch as high as we had string.
I got the camera to work, and you got me to smile.
It was a day when nothing happened
that we will find worth remembering.
If we were mathematical, perhaps we could calculate
the sum of days like these:
lunch on a blanket minus pain equals what?