It's Still Life

Heat: To Sweat & Turn & Tick

By 5 o’clock, I’m buckled into heat. Its grim tactics empty me of summer’s pleasure – no appetite for sweet cherries, no thirst for berries. And tender leaves curl in distress, shrivel into brown and brittle spines as if devoured by cruelty. And so pitiful those cankered apples lay green and bruised, fallen to the ground yesterday. They sweat and turn and tick with maggots. Everything falls before this heat. Gold becomes the sun’s ballast, and silver spins the stars to burn and fall. Even the moon seems a flabby slack, more like a piteous sail lost in the sky. We are all and each lost in this flagellant heat as it rises heavy and naked. And I long to escape into a lukewarm sea.

Those fugitive clouds
blow quiet across the sky
without permission.

for dVerse Haibun #17 “Heat“