august

august’s waning augments

altostratus angst

breathing old white oak

sheet-white rains

over bones clean-picked

in yellow jackets warm

milk thistle masked as ironweed

with shoulders tensed at treeline

bows to barometric rage

unreclused yet unawake

lunar anomalies lack lyricism

stagnating the tesselating

of the articulatory vines

bordered in deep

by stillness on hillside

grieving silences coiled

clumsily in cicada sheds

and lucid dreams

where windows breaking

emit no earthly sound

and years mapped in,

deft navigators, met

with grateful hands purposed

to collect yellow scatterlings,

black-ice and butterscotch,

like wings of some small things

there, where i try to relive the day

dead in the river, and

i am too old for all these first times

caught in the devotion-tide,

to read the joys and the aches of you