Like Summer

Yaak, Montana

Green eyes hover in midair,

in malicious glee.

Damp fingers and bittersweet regret.

A soupçon of perspiration at the nape of necks.

Frostily cold stares,

see these winter days advance.

Summer hours elapse

into delightful rows of colorful spruce.

Undarkened, chilled confluences scurry rapid.

Wreathing wind granulates ageless rocks.

Wool yarn protects winter ears,

the benefit and absorption of cultural heat.

A warm, lauding voice,

without thunder or antics.

Lifting weights of emotional baggage,

in a strained and heaving manner,

like a beached whale.

Sandals never again to see sunlight,

runny nose trickles.

Direct encounters never superficial,

broken eye contact.

Ripples of unbluntedly razor-like splashes

loaf innocently on downed logs.

Naturalist novels seem jejune,

imparting a sense of mystery and holiday.

Youthful rebels,

the hero stands on the same plains as the oppressed.

Mollifying white and baby blue flow over the stubborn obstacle of rocks,

a streak of fatalism conspiring to keep novelty in the groove already dug.

Flowers climb to gay, insouciant skies alongside Douglas fir rows.

Pebbles of our personalities,

overturned to reveal those marshy, hidden sides,

the folly of all recriminations,

the jealous contagion to which the brain succumbs,

threats to life and sustenance.

Hikes help harmonize,

empty imaginings troubling atheists.

Gracious compromises and mining payrolls.

Aging radicals empty into young intellectuals,

evolve into wishful thinking.

Mounds of raggedy, rough minerals.

Craggy cliffs with declivitous endings,

the physical realities of the throne.

Short lives,

bouncing harmlessly as a cloth doll on grandma’s lap.

Small helpless states,

pretentiousness garbed in the unintelligible,

makers of disposable art,

the zeal to make a scoop unstoppable,

pacified by fresh news,

of scrabbling sexy movements.

Contours of body and betrayal of inner feelings,

savagely hungry silhouette of lips.

Pulse, vibration and rumbling energy of geographical soul and local spirit,

figure and form lined up.

More of the sun’s splinters smack this naked riverbed.

Kiss the firewood, flower beds, and firm forearms.

Tributary gushes from the unseemly grunts of a secret source.

Light of the train reflects,

and then whizzes through lilac sweatpants and abundantly thick spruce,

weary conductor entangled in the figure of folly.

Campfire sweater, mustard can sardines, blackened palms,

a dog of uncertain temper.

Inner peace,

recanted confessions,

overwhelming odds,

lead and dust,

live deep inside canyons.

Weights fall with a jarring clatter.

Further slippage of obvious love,

challenged and resisted by sojourning individuals,

haggling because of disputable facts and generalities,

causing lustrous lips to heat stiff necks.

Like summer.

Love elephant and want to go steady?

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Author: Brian D’Ambrosio

Apprentice Editor: Kim Haas / Editor: Emily Bartran

Photos: Author’s own