august again

finally in, in the new house. homing it up some. i don't think we'd been home for more than a week all summer, or it felt that way. went to iowa, where the land is flat and corn-ruined and where it felt like fall. i read a book by robert haas while i was there. i don't read poetry, i don't know why, but a friend recommended it pretty hard and i like "eastern" things and i like haas's version of basho, issa, and buson. so i read Praise and loved it. it fit so so so much a summer into me besides the one i was living. here's an excerpt from a poem called "Songs to Survive the Summer":

...I thought of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work
and of a morning two Julys ago
on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

down the hill when one
rusty elm leaf, earth-
skin peeling, wafted

by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall
and preternaturally

a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard
the ruffle of wings

three hundred yards below me
rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty

and that clean-shaven man
smelling of lotion,
lint-free, walking

toward his work, a
pure exclusive music
in his mind.

and this from "The Beginning of September":

In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise

In the fall
plums the color of dusk

there's no way of saying what these poems felt to me reading them in a foreign bedroom in the summer, without airconditioning, curtains blowing, moving from bedroom to a tent the next night, where the wind swept so hard through an oak tree outside that i dreamt of ocean waves all night. i want summer hotter and heavier and like some thirst, to stay just unquenched, because it's always the longing, i think, that's better.