The Summer I Was Pretty, and: Dog Days

The Summer I Was Pretty

The summer I was pretty I didn't have todo a thing. Every man had a poem in his pocketfor me. One man even said I would be the death of him.No one had ever said that about me before.The summer I was pretty the heatwas immense. The public swimming pool was a massof angry bodies. No one was happy. I flew to NYC,I flew to Chicago, everywhere the same, my bed,the sheets I couldn't bear to clean.The man who said I'd be his death didn't die.He stood outside my window and watched me.It did not feel as romantic as I thought it would.I had to remain very still and classical while writingan elegy to my small allotment of beauty—what we both knew wouldn't last.

Dog Days

And then the chorus rises, cicadas tuning upas the sun ticks down, their tin voices chantingthe moral of the story before the storyends, how there might seem to be escape            but there's only the field            on the edge of a woodwhen the shadowed stag steps from the trees,

there's only the two women so stunnedby his arrival that they pausefrom sex to watch him watch them            with one hoof raised, considering.

And if at first they feel wonder, it's fear that next slides alongside                    the muscled bulk                    of him, the antlers promising                    violence wrapped in ripped velvet.

It doesn't last—this fever heat stillness.One woman shifts her weight and he's gone.But the sound of a god's exitremains, a ringing        carried by the fine hairs in their ears.

Though the women return to themselves,                they can't return to each other.                The rhythm                    is lost, the grass sharp                        under their knees.There's not enough light anymore    to see but there's enoughto thread this moment        alongside other disappointments                    and so history                    resumes, and with it the old complaints.This was a real thing that happened, and thenhappened again.

                I want to return to when                she pinned my ears with her thighs                and I listened.I remember her breastwarm in my hand, how I'd felt                her heartbeat leaping—                    it leapt for the stag.