Like the first time it
weightlessly
darkens your mind
that you've almost been
at the same
task for too long,
so the rainlessness
gradually bakes
its cracks and imperfections
into mid-August.
From park to mangy parkway,
nothing fresh
is happening—
just the slow bleaching
and rusting of status quos
which typify hard-won
and wistfully
lackadaisical midlife.
Dog days,
we call them—the shaggy
glaucomic old hunters
nosing already for
that twinge
of September,
that shiver—a portent
without any
prompt from memory:
death will return here
as beauty's young
heiress, not it's mother.
