Remembering May: the center of the bright day

Here's the deep golden noon hour
come to rest on our place
like a sleeping cat,
long light and short shadows,
ambers, greens and aging browns
touching fungal splashes

of palm-sized color (creams
and pinks and raspberries) that
patch
the scaly ancient bark on oaken arms
flung out high above the house —
all gathered in motionless repose.
Trees whose great limbs otherwise
nod and bow in dreaming conversa
tion
now reach only for the sky,

as if restrained in worship
at a sacred center,
the center of the bright day.
In other times of light or dark
The wind-rocked woods make up
a choreography of futuring,
the endless act of passing on
I watch from porch or windows.
We'll join that dance before too long,
but not in mid-day summer-turning
May.
Above, the punch-drunk cauliflower

clouds
in great heads swell
into the sky's blue bowl
like giddy suitors.
I promise, they seem to say.
I promise an afternoon kiss.




No need to add: And then the rain



will come.

(From a love letter, 20 miles inland. Written May 27, with photos of the next day.)