Summer Isn’t a Life-Form, Exactly
However, summer, as itself, has attributes of life.
It emerges when the hard shell of winter cracks
and the infant spring soon becomes summer
fully born. Summer’s birthday then is celebrated
like a new child come to the world, galas
of flowers, fetes of color and songs of freedom.
Summer is not moribund like a still pillar
of stone, not a blank, sheer, silent granite wall.
Summer constantly reaches out and inward, as do
we all, with many a variety of appendages surely,
vines, tendrils, limbs, roots, blossoms, searching,
exploring, encroaching on sky and earth, as do we all.
The same as most other life-forms, summer
has a voice, a steady score of tiny taps, bellows,
bell tones, and shrieks, a percussion of clickings
like hidden needles knitting in the beetle-heady
grasses, reams of messages, a diary of summer psalms
(properly translated) winging the sky with song.
Summer breathes a menagerie of fragrances,
juicy berries, red and purple, the scents of warm,
fertile riverside mud, and dreamy memories,
the perfumes of a wildflower-sun over colorful
plains and fields not always seen or found by everyone.
Summer is a life-form, precisely. It lives
with focused intent to its fullness of abundance
and then recedes, as do we all, dying a dreadful
death, withered leaves of maples, oaks, sweet gums,
cultivated violet roses, latticed morning glories,
all reduced to shattered forests and blackened
gardens, summer, stripped of its allure, splintered,
its former radiant presence now sodden refuse,
the remains of summer’s once grand being.
But look now at the living summer’s dawdling,
how its creek laps and licks the earth, tongues
its sweet and pungent fruits as it passes, dallies
and caresses its tiny waterweeds and swaying
ferns, offering itself wide open. Go ahead.
You know how. Jump right in.
A Remnant
Once, as a child playing in our attic, I found
a small ceramic box forgotten in the dark corner
of a desk drawer. I unlatched the lid, carefully
lifted the white tissue inside to reveal the complete
skeleton of a small seahorse lying as if sleeping
on a bed of cotton. It was more beautiful, more
finely intricate, than any ornament of lace, more
entrancing than any diamond or ruby rock
could be. So far from the sea . . . I looked
a long time, didn’t touch, left it as it had been,
closed the lid, whispered a word, lay the tiny
casket away in the dark desk, shut the drawer
to light, still hearing the cresting sea, still
feeling the swell of its current.
Pattiann Rogers has published 15 books of poetry, including Firekeeper: Selected Poems and Quickening Fields, and two books of essays. Flickering, her 16th book of poetry, published on April 4, 2023. Among other awards, she has received a John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Writing, two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship and a Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. She has two sons and three grandsons and lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.
Read an interview with Pattiann Rogers, as well as three poems and two poems and an essay, “Under an Open Sky: Poems on the Land,” by Pattiann Rogers appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Larisa Koshkina, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Pattiann Rogers with her son, John A. Rogers, who contributed a section to Flickering, by Lisa Dhar.
