Then there's the weather,
the beginning of the hot season,
this "summer thing" lasting a lifetime.
 

All night we've spun on the turnspit of dreams,
flooding the  broodnest,
encrusting the air.
 

We smolder into morning
with neither blessing nor direction
as the sun slow-wheeling down the wall
 

settling on one object, then another,
comes to rest before it
turns to haunt some other dark.
 

We're not driven but enchanted
by the quick breath of the hour
drenching us in pungent
 

fluid and the moisture cools
the body's temperature but nothing's
temperate about us.
 

When winter's white camouflage
adds another layer to our lives, we
discover where those days are stored
 

bring them up to the light, pry them open,
breathe the succulent air and taste
the flavor glazed with August, we
preserved all these years.

 *

Light cartwheels into morning
returning to the same spot as if it
knew the way, sheets sticky
with summer, the scald of August.
 

Air glows, sweat jewels your chest
and the future hangs suspended,
the past invisible
as we burrow into love.
 

Here, I am no one's child
and no one's mother
following the silken thread
through the stillness of the maze.
 

In the measuring of breath,
in the words between us and the looks,
balanced, cantilevered, interlocked,
we plot distances and chart the depths.
 

Out of sun and fog, out of clover,
mint and pennyroyal, out of fragrances
of fresh-cut grass, we have come this far.
*

After the long night and porcelain dreams,
after rivers of sleep, morning
hangs by a thread.
Face to face, we imagine our bodies
stored in hollows,
secret deposits deep in the past.
 

The day has no beginnings
sky goes everywhere at once
in turquoise innocence.
Warmth rises.   Sweat gleams
and the echo of our interlocking rhythms
pulse through vacant rooms.
 

This house is what it is,
each wall stands alone
each window with a sky of its own
and we are reaching backwards, love,
in a seethe of memories
that ache like static from another world.

Ruth Daigon edited Poets On: for 20 years. Her poems have been widely published both in print and on the web.  Daigon's poetry awards include "The Eve Of St. Agnes",1993 and 1994 (Negative Capability) "The Ann Stanford Poetry Prize," 1997 (University of Southern California Anthology) She has published 3 chapbooks on the web. THE MOON INSIDE (Gravity/Newton's Baby Press), her new poetry anthology (fifth) is now out.

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