The Unlikely Summer

The Unlikely Summer

It was

an unusual summer.

The heat left town, embarrassed

after a bad opening night.

Sparrows and hummingbirds broke

union rules and danced in the same line-up,

decorating spotlight sunflowers like seeds of glass.

At night, significant rabbits with pocketwatches

came to the back door in top hat and tails, asking

the way to wonderland, but time jumped

upstream wild and fast as salmon in a silver river

and they were ~ always ~ late.

I dialed the broken wheel on the landline

till my digits calloused, to speak long distance to

the empty place where you had been ~  always ~

I got the machine ~ always ~ noncommittally polite

and willing to take a message, but

I knew I'd never hear back, even though

every flower in my garden bloomed

out loud for you in that

unusual summer

where secret thunder on the east

met the lightning climbing out of bowls

of blue cloud, hollow, vast and tortured with swell.

Everything rained and turned to tatters.

I opened my heart to the storm

and it came in,
like Jesus filling a canvas tent,

and the blur and the flicker

fell into my fingers until I became

~all ways ~
dangerous, until

I wasn't safe for birds or rabbits, until

I could touch nothing
alive,

nothing at all.

~July 2013

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Friday Night Raw

Corey Rowley (Herotomost) asks us to dig deep into our toolbox as writers and use technique, different devices and styles to engage the reader, to access and convey the intensity of our emotions. He also mentions some bat guano. I think I got that part down. 



This is also posted for my friend Karin Gustafson's prompt 'a body or bodies of water,' at      
dverse poets 

(She said a rain drop was acceptable, so...)

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Images from Fick'r Creative Commons. Hover mouse for attribution, or click on pic to go to the photographer's flick'r page.