aestival

There is a particular slant of morning

that visits maybe four times a year,

the light arriving at exactly the wrong angle

to be useful,

too gentle for the season it pretends to carry —

and I felt it again this week,

that blue-sky with its cumulus clouds

rolling unhurried past the window

like they had somewhere to be

but weren’t in any rush about it,

the air sitting at seventy-two degrees

and smelling like the last day of school.

I know what that smell is, technically:

cut grass and someone’s coconut sunscreen

next door,

the particular ozone of an afternoon

that has nowhere to be.

the body doesn’t care about technically.

The body remembers the sensation

of standing at the edge of summer

with both hands open.

There was a dollar theater at Antioch

that ran old Disney pictures all June —

The Love Bug, The Apple Dumpling Gang…

and the cold inside there was almost violent

after the walk from the parking lot,

and you’d sit there in the dark-

at eleven in the morning–

eating popcorn with the other kids

while the moms feigned interest

and the entire afternoon still waited for you

after,

the pool,

the slow bike ride home in the heat,

the way chlorine stayed on your skin

like evidence of the day you’d had.

But this isn’t the point I’m trying to make.

What I want to talk about is that I stood

at the window this morning

watching the clouds do their unhurried thing

and I felt the whole opening

— the threshold feeling, the possibility feeling,

the feeling that the day was a door

and you were allowed to walk through it

into something that had no agenda —

and then my phone lit up,

and someone needed quarterly reports,

and there was a thing due,

and another thing behind that thing,

and the day continued to be seventy-two degrees and perfect

outside the window:

the side where I was not.

That’s the whole poem, really.

The light comes back.

It finds you.

It doesn’t care what year it is

or what you owe on your credit cards.

And you stand there

holding your coffee

like a man who knows the exact word

for what he’s feeling

and has absolutely nowhere

to put it.