august

august 9, 2007

The sun rises hot and miserable
slowly boiling off the lonely city's ocean.
My ears pop with the pressure
until it breaks, a cool torrent uprooting trees.
On the streets they hawk water
for a dollar, a dollar fifty, then two.

The women stay fashionable here,
in their long jeans, short jackets,
fashionable as they crowd into overstuffed subway cars,
where they threaten violence to their screaming, sweating children,
and violence to strangers who jostle them,
who curse out the beautiful baby 
for being Dominican instead of Puerto Rican.

The women are strong, but the city is angry.
August is a cruel month.
On the fourth floor, without air conditioning,
we mix water, sugar, chocolate,
freeze it and call it dessert — my sister's recipe.
I shout to you over white noise,
a fan in every window drowning out the sirens and car alarms.
I don't mind, really.
In August I fall in love with you.

August is the long silence,
where action hangs suspended, almost bored
at the top of her accelerating arc.
In the silence between phone calls, waiting for life to reboot,
she is almost weightless.
The phone — 
you are on the train,
I am on the bus,
we walk together.
I will see you in two weeks, a day, three hours.
Thunderstorms recall
long-ago summer blackouts
where I could soak up the water with James Morrow's God,
soothing raw turmoil with the sound of your unexpected voice.

August is hot, sweltering silence.
One voice in emptiness — I hear yours in my harmonics;
you speak and I hear mine in yours.
Once-clumsy dancers, we weave around each other,
flung apart, then twisting close together.
The separations are necessary for the togetherness
as even a failed Girl Scout knows,
weaving the two-strand knot with careful intuition.

In the silence, the projectile's split second stretches:
she has time to choose.
Each time is a mystery,
each could be the one
where gravity fails.
She thinks, 
chooses,
always falling home to you.