Awaiting Passage into Fall

When a Southern August lays on hands,
a lush embrace of steamy weeks
sets in before the fall.

Through waning days I run the dawn
by tidy lawns refreshed with dew.
Their scent and sparkle stir anew

as memories reconstitute
old seasons born so long ago
in stain and sweat and schoolboy pride

forged from summer football trials
in heat and pads on high school fields
that to young minds must surely yield

triumphant Friday nights to come
if only August days would end
at last in break of fall.

Those Southern rites of passage echo yet
in aching muscles one-time strong.
They burn inside my body

decades on as by degrees
the morning dark seeps into day
and evening light melts away.

Locked in August once again,
the weeks pile up as all await
the break of heat that snaps the spell

while age and darkness creep, encroach,
and claim their share of fading light
for passage into fall.

More poems of August:

Coming Home

Jurassic Dreams and Katydids

Weeds Have Names

False Memories

Athens, Georgia

April 30, 2011

I close my eyes and even now

I see the ball roll in the hole

it fell just left of center line

to save a score, it’s only right

my swings were crisp, the strokes were pure

in execution, strong and sure

I see it still as plain as sin

so why this feeling of despair

which haunts my memory of that hole?

Though memory’s strong, it’s also wrong:

in fact that ball slid by the cup

no matter what my call is now.

Though memory seeks to serve the soul

and that is kind, we need a break

but we must also serve what’s so

and cruel facts must play a role

in worlds that we construct inside.

I cannot hide in poetry,

this is no longer metaphor –

the ball fell in or it did not

it’s not some blurry quantum cat

awaiting its ambiguous fate:

dead or not I need the fact.

But now I question what is true

and what I hold in memory:

did that heron never speak

and share his sacred soul with me?

Did I never stride the high

savannah under blazing sky,

or never skied through snowy Banff

to bathe my soul in Lake Louise?

And was I not an engineer

who wrote in Fortran: IF-THEN-ELSE,

to have the code go through the THEN

or pass it by and do the ELSE?

But now I write my code in lines

that do no more than mark my time

in another world where golf balls drop

to serve what’s right, no matter what.