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.