Summer’s Last Exhale

Summer’s Last Exhale

How it shifts in a flash, the sun’s face bled
to the edge of anemia, and I can
stand under its living stare and not
wither. Half a fortnight ago and just
clipping shrubs would see my shirt soaked

with salty sweat, but now my toes are numb
and all has moved winterward. Jinx the fake
heeler sits hard by my feet, spots like
bullet holes along his flank, and I wonder
what arcane and occult runes I might

discover if I connected them in a certain
way, perhaps using my sinister hand?
At least I wouldn’t have to fear immolation
as a witch, because witches have more of the
world’s regard than hermits and nuns, but how

many of them have healed burn victims ? The song
of autumn is written out before me today
as I sit here under this slowly changing
maple, its hands waving to distract us
as she sheds her blouse to show the russet

petticoats beneath, and look at all her
suitors — goldfinch and bluebird, nuthatch and titmouse,
and the soon-traveling beelike hummingbird
with his long day’s journey coming up soon.
The crickets are scraping their fiddles in long

drone-strokes and the grass is as slow
and un-vital as he who clips it, and it
hides the scurrying spiders trying to elude
the killing wasps. The cardinals, passed off in
crimson he and rusty she, remind me

of the Vatican variety, and my forgiven
heart, glad I crouch amid the good
kind and not the equivocating sort
they have over in Rome. Jinx is peering
up, following a soaring hawk who hangs

upon the thermal roads unseen by my
envious eyes, wings wide as I am
tall, his pupils keener than a tax
accountant, shadow on the aging vegetable
garden, scanning for a rabbit, lettuce

prey. And when the breeze strokes my neck —
not nearly as welcome as it was a week
ago — I’m grateful for my flannel shirt,
and the dog and I move from shade to
shine. They say we’re made of stardust, and it’s

easy to believe when I’m beneath
this great star’s thermonuclear breath.
All things I see are alive, aware,
and more and more I think we parry and thrust,
me noticing them and them aware of me,

and what passes between us surpasses fist
and book and brick and guitar. If I may be
aloud, I’ll say that the wonder is not that
Christ the Lord once breathed and healed, but that
even considering the sneaky stream of machinations,

the whispering theologians,  the strange silence
of my ancestors, the well-fed clergy’s wheeze-prayers,
the rhythmic rasp of the earth’s exhalations
on the death-day of a saint or a
season, all the adds and takes and shady

interpolations, the glowering fact that those
like me and my sturdy boys can still believe,
still embrace, still drive knees into turf,
still love Him, caring what He thinks,
and still hope to sit with him on the ground

of Heaven (I imagine it looks like coffee grounds)
and talk of pencil shavings and incense
glow-trails, and never once mention
guilt or gilt or substitutionary
atonement. Those will be fine eras,

and I will be surprised at what I never
knew I never cared to trifle with,
my bones at rest after all, among the robed
stones, fine and fierce and white as mist,
standing watch, dissolving into fall.

~ S.K. Orr