The Interruption of Summer

I should have known it, that a swooping jay

would interrupt this ease

with its bleak scold, blue-lightning screech,

and yet I didn’t. I’m a fool, of course.

Been here all morning at eye-level

with the bloom of earth,

a sloping lawn,

this golden-green and summery resolve

of August where I sit,

with dandelion bursts and chicory and rue

attracting butterflies and bees

beneath the high black arms of locusts,

birches with their leaves like perfect hands

that wave a little in the slightest winds

to say they’re real, that I’m real, too.

The jay came shooting from a height

like sudden pain,

a cold remembered January cry

that locked the world in iron lace

and kept me from my Adirondack chair,

this closeness to the grass, its soft serene,

the cool brown dirt my bare feet feel.

But everything is what it is, must be,

this passing paradise,

a sun-begotten honeyed August day:

unbidden, born again, beheld.

And maybe in the dream of some gold time

it will be mine to have again and hold,

with always as the part of speech

most prized yet purchased at a hefty price.