Can I accept this summer
without processing it;
let it murmur its quiet comfort
through foliage & insect hum,
trill its filigreed silentium
over these worn-out bodies;
let the summer accept me, regardless?

Can I exist in this summer
without rebuilding it in sweat & ache?

Can I release the unspoken demands
upon former friends
to confront their pains
and wrench themselves free of their vises,
and instead wish them a gentle death
within their well-upholstered iron grips?

At my age
it is almost always Sunday in the pill organizer;
the secular-liturgical day of rest
of an everlasting weekend;
a kind of timelessness in the expenditure of time,
consumed by time, almost dissolved
in the rattle of Dr. Schell's pharmakon
down the seven holy lightwells –

for however stubbornly slow each day
on its way through the week
may seem,
the days have vanished as if by magic
when the fingers grope beneath compartment seven

I hear Messiah Hallberg
in the Sunday Interview describe
how warm & moved he felt
when his daughter, on the day she came of age,
dropped by that evening for a while with a friend,
and how this natural gesture of love
would remain with him forever,

and I feel how this gesture,
by circuitous routes, is related
to my ninety-five-year-old mother's gesture
upon her deathbed,
when she grabbed hold of my hand,
when I was about to leave;
kissed it,
and sent me onward through the signs of life,
herself deeply marked by death,
soon to be committed to the earth as soot & dust

Yes, can I accept this summer
without resistance or fine-tuning;
welcome its quiet comfort
through foliage & insect hum,
rest in its filigreed silentium
over these worn-out bodies;
let myself be summer-accepted, regardless?