The summer the sun hid
not behind clouds it was the summer of no rain here
the summer democracy clacked and thumped
with its loosening parts
the summer the sun began blazing orange through smoke
of close and distant forests burning
the summer the moon at night stared orange
bloodshot alarming
sprays of cedars in the median at the entrance to my street orange
one week the smoke cleared the sun hid partly behind the moon
made a show in the sky but what I loved were the crescent suns
between every shadow on the ground formed in the spaces between leaves
innumerable crescents on the sidewalk the roadway the dove-gray garage door
every little crescent an anomaly a reverie a marvel
the summer I was that woman watering cedar trees with two one-gallon jugs
I filled with my garden hose drove down my street in my automobile
emptied them in the median at the branches’ driplines
what if democracy is not a machine but a delicate complex organism
requiring water and nurture to keep it photosynthesizing carbon-fixing
the summer the shape of the moon
pressed itself over and over onto the earth
Jennifer Bullis is author of Impossible Lessons (MoonPath, 2013). Recent poems are appearing in Water~Stone Review, Cherry Tree, Cave Wall, and Under a Warm Green Linden. She is librettist for a cantata in the voices of the Sirens commissioned by Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and her manuscript of resistance poems, “The Tongue of Narcissus,” is a finalist for the Brittingham & Pollak Prizes.
Read Jennifer Bullis’s prose Letter to America appearing February 4, 2017.
Header photo by Phongsak Meedaenphai, courtesy Shutterstock.
