Summer is senescing into soft spools of shadow.
Autumn sweetens the mornings with his hard ambrosia.
We are inside late summer, mostly naked.
The bed is a flourish of spackled sun, sweat, splayed
bodies, all the abstract viscera of a crime scene.
There are veins of green in your eyes, lapidary,
like spindly seaweed trellised under a dock,
phosphorescent.

Motes of pollen clutter the window, and
motes of dust scatter the floor.
The sunlight is refracted and our feet -
writhing or not, occasionally intertwined,
reaching for an itch and dangling off the
mattress - are black soled and worn,
like the calloused feet of coal miners,
sepulchral.

We are talking about literature, politics.
About drones destroying Pakistani villages
and children climbing barefoot in rubble.
About riots in Britain, default in Greece,
a helicopter burning in Afghanistan.
The trees in our periphera of vision,
heavy and encumbered, shiver with laughter,
deep green and then turning over silver.

They can’t help the joy.
In winter, their widowed skeletons
wake to barren wind.
But we keep them braying tenderly in dreams,
awash in sun
and laughter
and soft shadow,
naked,
the wind pattering through, elusive and frail,
in late summer
in this our final year.