Serious issues, serious seasons

Third Summer’s Day

Summer runs a slow finger along the back of a settee.
She wants me to come in and play. She lets a shoulder
fall out of a slight dress, turns her batting eyes until they
find me on her elemental table. Barely the third day,

and she is playing coy and deliberate. I decide not to
get all Hiroshima and allow the ache of her to imprint
my shadow against any measure of ruin by any other
method than the sun she once drew in a paper sky for me.

It was a half-lidded sun, still sleepy, I suppose, having been
out all night, almost eclipsed from the chore of brilliancing
all that fell before it like lovers who throw their senses into
pools that radiate with worried depths and furrowed shallows.



This is only the third day of summer and already serious issues require serious seasons. There'll be no Orange Juliuses in Laguna, no white-haired Greeter to buoy our adolescent senses with hale welcomes and a blue-eyed burn like a heaven we’ll never forget.

She runs a slow finger, drapes a lazy leg, would just as soon let us slip beneath the riptide as send surfers to rescue us from our good summer deeds in saving two girls from treacherous salt breakers that roll in from worlds away, unfathomable summer worlds away.

Joseph Gallo
June 23, 2007