Wither
I feel an ending
traveling through my bones.
It stops for gas
just short of my liver,
looks for some diversion
a roadside attraction
as it spreads a cloth
under an infested juniper,
making a picnic of fingernails
and rheum, mumbling,
"Damn the bagworms."
How long time seems
in this heat-strangled house
carpentered by a coffinmaker sun,
with no appetite for increasing,
no single cell willing
to grow and not die.
We gracelessly surrender
to the wither
of merciless azure. Even the land,
with its skin drawn taut
as a snake's winding sheet
drying in August's crinkled moult,
knows when to quit.
The newborn rain comes,
leaves flush and spin;
when this red shambled summer
finds its cold-spangled grave,
someone will laugh
up a pumpkin-spiced sleeve
under feckless wild stars
while the goldenrod blooms and my ending
takes a short vacation.
August 2023
posted for Summer's End
Images: Gas, 1940 ©Edward Hopper Fair Use
Native Oklahoma Goldenrod, via okprairie on Pinterest Fair Use
