Sophia

14

For Me, Every Summer has 7 parts:
1:

I sing of
summer rains.
kicking up dust on the pavement,
the steadiness,
echoing my beating heart,
it’s cadence,
etching it’s way
across my mind,
the tin roof,
alive again,
dreaming, reborn,
the rythym of the their
rain,
has uttered its comforting
syllables
“all that is drowsy,
all that is safe”

2:

cups of moonlight strewn
across the wider lawn,
pockets of laughter,
and billowing smoke,
no cars whirring
down the avenue this
late,
so the world is ours,
shared only with the
lone star,
illuminating the
smooth edges of
our faces,
in that
last night,
forever the darkest.

3:
He drapes his
arms- willowy and sunbrowned,
over the edge of the
chair, cradling
your child and says
that
he had hoped that he would
have found
a job by now,
and we know he was thinking,
what kind of father
cannot provide for his child,
and what kind of husband
cannot apologize to
his wife?

4.
muscle-stretched
paper thin,
iridescent and
bare to the extreme,
the rawest,
realest
specimen,
it is dead,
you are told,
but the current is delivered,
and you can swear that
you can see it ripple, and
the cells lapse in
and out of living,
as a creature
reborn.

5.

Long shadows etched their
way across the channel,
the moon swaying in
the sky mechanically,
a pendulum,
it’s user whispering
in hypnotic tone
-hush, morning shall come
for you, too-
The river, my moat,
The harbor,
my castle,
The stars my subjects,
and you, my queen.

6.

Rest your feet
on a bough that
I can’t reach

Rest your mind,
your tired thoughts
will soon align.

So seal your heart,
for a dreamer and
her dreams are soon
to part.

And open your eyes,
for quickly you will
realize that
all we are is a mass of
flesh stretched over bone,

and we’re really all alone.

7.
In these sunlit last
moments,
you might have formed one
last word on broken lips,
from a broken mind,
halved,
pithed,
diced,
doused in iodine antiseptic
sold by the ounce.

but I saw no spark in your
unwavering open eyes,
and no whisper or sharp cry of one
last word,
(cueing the instrumentalists, who
weep into their violas)
echoed in these hospice
hallways.
It would have been perfect -
-punctuating
this silenced
decade of your life,
ironic,
sweet,
with close-ups of both of our roman noses,
silhouetted by
fluorescent bulbs,
and white noise,
you would be
silent again for the last
time,
and just as the
music crescendo
ed,
you would shut your
eyes, and I would
rest assured that you had
lived the right life and died
the right death,
and our performance would be given 5 stars
by the LA Times.

But you didn’t, instead staying
silent
until the end,
where the only sound was the incessant
bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
of the heart monitor,
leaving be no
movie cameras to continue the
struggle for.

For the life of me,
I can’t remember
what your last words were because
I always assumed
there would be more.