"Oh Blessed Season"
Listen to Chris Forhan read this poem.
Summer strode slowly in clownish festoonery, forgiving everything.
Blessed was the fruit of its womb: slumbering bees, blossoms' furious purple
*****effusions,
clouds scattered like napkins late of lips moist with cream and champagne.
Chiffon was a word heard often then.
Oh, to live like that again, operatically bored with the reckless long business of
*****becoming.
To loll on a ridge above the jostling gondolas,
to sprawl in a field amid the ruins of lunch, the crumbs and rinds,
to be slaked by a final swallow of wine and feel safely ravaged and awry,
to joy in the horses' forelocks, beribboned with blooms of sweet everlasting—
a distraction from the black, inapt cast of their eyes,
that sequestered look, as of something they've seen and not forgotten yet.
Chris Forhan has published two collections of poems, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Forgive Us Our Happiness. He teaches at Auburn University.
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