It’s the day before summer.
I’m searching my memory
for hints of what it used to be
like, that summer free.
I’d like to know, what I can expect
once tomorrow comes,
what I can require.
Waking up to a breakfast
of something, nothing special,
followed by some activity.
*
Back to a classroom- not my usual.
Something to explore.
It’s not math, it’s not a worksheet – don’t worry.
How do you feel?
How about
responding to the colors,
slashes of emotion, sharpened,
lucidly expressing something
in a magazine cutout?
What do I think of that?
*
Or, holding large coffee-table books
with awesome images
cool against my bare knees, then sealed there
it remains as I search for
words to string into poetry?
*
The blast of cold that rampages my skin
as I step into the sanctuary, heavily wooded
with printed volumes
and run over by strollers and retirees.
Hours later, weighed down to wobbly,
I stagger out carrying bricks
of someone else’s histories.
Some I may put down, laying them
before me as a path of “nexts” to step onto.
What a good idea!
*
And this – what,
the smell of the inside of a theater,
the heat of the lights beating down
as I nervously remind myself of my lines.
*
A stroll in the town center,
am I looking for something?
Maybe, but why not stop for
a treat, at the bakery?
Great idea – let’s sit a while.
this same spot I like to visit,
but what else do I see now?
*
Homeward, fly!
The rumble starts,
the air conditioning resumes
to each his own bubble,
close the doors.
The day’s
cooled thoughts settle to the bottom,
warm ones rise like iridescent bubbles.
*
Before dinner,
I pick up a book, with a casual appetite,
that soon intensified, so rapidly I tear through.
I’m there. Wherever.
It’s summer, so I’m free to be there,
as long as I please.
No homework to do, except easy summer reads.
Time to eat! – How I dreaded those words in summer,
for I’d really, much rather, pick up and leave
again, the hallways in my imagination
so easily and deftly furnished by
summer’s muses, awakened and at work
piecing together a collage of lots of days,
a scintillating decoupage of nothing-special’s.
*
Step back, slowly, see
the leaves from newest greens
to burning reds turn,
and enter, stage left,
amidst a glowing, warm embrace
another season, in.
composed 6-19-12