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Long
days, short nights, this Southern summer
Fixes the mind within its timeless place.
Athwart pale limbs
the brazen hummer
Hangs and is gone, warm sound its quickened space.
Butterfly weed and
cardinal flower,
Orange and red, with indigo the band,
Perfect themselves
unto the hour.
And blood suffused within the sunlit hand,
Within the glistening
eye the dew,
Are slow with their slow moving. Watch their passing,
As lightly the shade
covers you:
All colors and all shapes enrich its massing.
Once I endured such
gentle season.
Blood-root, trillium, sweet flag, and swamp aster—
In their mild urgency,
the reason
Knew each and kept each chosen from disaster.
Now even dusk destroys;
the bright
Leucothoë dissolves before the eyes
And poised upon the
reach of light
Leaves only what no reasoning dare surmise.
Dim isolation holds
the sense
Of being, intimate as breathing; around,
Voices, unmeasured
and intense,
Throb with the heart below the edge of sound.
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