Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside cafe
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
~George Bilgere “August” from The Good Kiss
Twenty-five summers ago
I wrote a poem about the summer ending,
the shadows lengthening, and the light
gone soft and elegiac
like the end of a love song.
It joined roughly a million poems
written that summer alone
on the same subject, but in Spanish
or Japanese, or Swahili,
always the same thing, same shadows
lengthening, same soft light,
and I ended my poem, twenty five years ago,
by saying that the back of my hand
had begun to look like a dead leaf
or the back of someone else’s hand.
And this is just a shout out to say
to that version of me, a quarter
century ago, that the hand in question
looks even more like a dead leaf, even more
like the back of someone else’s hand,
but—and this is crucial, the importance
of this next observation cannot
be overstated—the strange old hand
is still here, still enduring, still writing itself
into itself.
~George Bilgere “After Escher”
I don’t recognize the back of my own hands – surely they belong to someone else.
How is it possible for my hands to now look like my mother’s did?
It’s only possible now that I’ve lived many summers.
Yet I’m not quite dried up like an old leaf. At least not yet.
This dry spell is over; this morning there is magic in the sound and smell of rain.
Like the old song:
“The bright blessed day
The dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world…”
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is deeply appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
