Lorie Greenspan is publishing director at a Deerfield Beach, Florida, book publishing company. Prior to moving to Florida in 2015, she was a newspaper editor in New Jersey for more than thirty years. Her poems have been inspired by the death in April 2020 of her husband of twenty years following a long illness. She also has written a middle-grade fantasy novel that she hopes to publish next year (2022).
Written on a warm day
How does summer feel to you?
My summer feels like the scratchy floral fabric of a couch
rich with the smells of all the sweat and crumbs
of the days and weeks of childhood,
and the musty lingering of humid walls and woolly rugs.
Summer feels like an overgrown lawn of weeds,
Queen's Lace, and dandelions,
or the plastic strips of an outdoor lounge chair
that hug but never mold to your body
because that would mean
it was your chair and no one else's.
And that couldn't be because everyone sat here.
Summer feels like the open window of the bedroom after a thunderstorm
when the droplets cling to the screen
and the western angled sun, low on the horizon,
shines its beams through them and the metal of the screen
and the dewy scent of the grass become the things you measure across time . . .
It is now this summer, and now this summer,
and these things become the rusty skeletons of seasons long gone.
It's funny, as you go about adult stuff in a new place,
where there are no more plastic strips on lawn chairs
and the couch has long been sent to the dump that you can still feel all of it,
as if time stands still in the mind,
as if the mind stands immobile against time
as if time and the mind are in a race to see which gets priority –
the lawn chair, the screen,
the pebbles of stone in the driveway which we didn't mention,
but are still there –
all of them do, of course.
That is the thing about growing old.
Your mind is time
and it won’t suffer abandonment.
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