So Hot, Roaches Kicking Back

I absolutely loathe poetry. Most of it is either tooth filling-shatteringly precious or stupefyingly obscure; I've always considered it the loony cousin of literature made to sit at the kid's table during holiday dinners and pull petals off a daisy.

That said, it's 90 degrees in New York City today, I'm melting, I'd knock over an Atlantic City-bound bus full of gloved grannies to get a Slurpee. My dazed, humidity-deadened brain can come up with nothing else to say but, "Shit, it's hot!", so I'll let this wonderfully evocative poem (gasp!) that I found by accident on the internet do the talking:

ODE TO SUMMER

Summer, red violin,bright cloud,
a buzzing of saw and cicada precedes you,
your sky is vaulted,
smooth and shining as an eye,
and beneath its gaze, summer,
fish of the infinite sky,
pleasing elytron, lazy, lethargic,
rounded bee's belly,
fiendish sun,
terrible, paternal sun,
sweaty as a laboring ox,
parched sun pounding on your head
like an unexpected clubbing,
thirsty sun trudging across the sand,
summer desert sea.

The sulphur miner drips yellow sweat;
ray by ray the pilot flies the celestial sun;
black sweat slides down a forehead
into eyes in the mine at Lota,
the miner wipes his black forehead,
sowed fields blaze,
wheat rustles,
blue insects seek shade,
touch coolness,
dip their heads in a diamond.

Abundant summer,
wagon of ripe apples,
strawberry mouth in the greenness,
lips of wild plums,
roads of soft dust
layered on dust,
midday, red copper drum,
and in the afternoon
the fire relents,
the air makes clover dance,
invades the desert furnace,
a cool star rises in the somber sky,
in the crackling though unscorched summer night.

--Dr. Douglas H. Sandberg