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.
