16.1 Summer 2018

Lance Larsen 32 Views from the Hammock

 

  1. Solstice, and still the maples are flaunting their green tresses.
  2. The smoky gossip of burning trash.
  3. A mug of yesterday’s tepid jasmine tea.
  4. What passes as shade: the drifting jibber-jabber of clouds.
  5. A hammock and a man are one.
  6. A hammock and a man and his wife’s shoulders are one.
  7. Not her actual shoulders, which are in Cincinnati this week.
  8. But his freckled memory of them.
  9. Next door, a trampoline launches a boy into the blue.
  10. Not on my watch, says gravity.
  11. Visit again real soon, says the air.
  12. Closer to earth, a fountain pleasures itself and gathers bees.
  13. A mantis interviews a cricket, one bite at a time.
  14. Sheets snapping in lavender praise.
  15. The crime is not Bartok or the piano or little girl hands.
  16. Blame the window, that busybody open window.
  17. Poor ant: trundling home a moth as big as a sail boat.
  18. Like much in life, wings are metaphor.
  19. So many leaves, so many shivery prayers.
  20. Free sky miles, says the sky—use them.
  21. Distant thunder, like God re-shelving books.
  22. Will this pile of gravel ever become a path?
  23. Do some angles of repose double as tipping points?
  24. Whose tragedy does that dying siren usher in?
  25. You call this a nap?
  26. Questions like these—they wear me out.
  27. Fit man, hammock, and longing into one sentence—never.
  28. Why not? His beloved’s shoulders won’t hold still.
  29. Do guardian angels choose whom they haunt?
  30. Rain, some say, is an aphrodisiac.
  31. Teach me, teach me tonight.
  32. Inside, the tea pot whistles, as if gathering our lost ones home.