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Notes for Second Summer
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
84 Notes for Second Summer Spring trips over itself in coming this year. I’m counting on it, expecting it, unlike the way you entered my life. Summer will make it, too, our backs in Tshirts stuck to car seats. Rocks I carried you from the Pacific still sit, arranged Zen-like, cold, waiting your touch; the ottoman a dumb monument. Nearby, your vacant sofa continues its vigil. All that crushed velvet— where I once wept realizing I’d found you—waiting, as you sleep in the room just above it, perhaps alone. Not far, I’ll sit on my own sofa, the day’s heat burning off, the wet breath of deciduous trees leaking into my window. I’ll write through the night, as I did last summer, fall and winter on your sofa, you sleeping just above me. This summer will be hard. I’ll be thin, the pounds of cold-month sadness slipping off like layers of clothes. I’ll be thin; women will look. I may touch their necks, smell their hair. Even the nights’ middles will be hot, but something in me—right here—will sit cold, waiting. Notes will be made in dim light. 85 Your sofa will be empty, patient. Even now I miss it terribly—the cushions, tense with ripeness; space over it barely breathing for lack of passion. ...