☆ Summer waning poetry
James Tissot: La Partie Carrée, 1870.
It's only early August, but change is in the air. Days a little shorter. Kids going back to school. Calibunga only open on weekends. But still--summer lingers. And Peter Coe Verbica catches it all in his rooted-in-the-South-Bay-foothills free verse. An Opp Now exclusive.
The Picnic
Now is not the time
to speak of a snake eating its own tail,
or to find the skeleton of a lost boy
caught inside a tree which up grew around him,
or to put pill bugs under a microscope
to witness the heads of monsters.
Let us instead snap
the ends of a picnic blanket
and let it float over shaded grass.
Pull vintage wine and smokey cheese
from the wicker belly of a basket
and listen to the gurgling of the creek.
While we watch water wash
over rounded rock.
I will slice our apples for you
like an aristocrat,
while you undress like Manet’s pale prostitute.
Wiggle your toes
and stretch in the warmth
of the early afternoon.
I will read to you sotto voce
from Parkman’s poetic prose:
of Maine forests and their rich decay,
of young seedlings
in the rotting carcass of wood,
of crowds of trees,
boughs interlocking,
as they elbow each other,
of a dark green ocean and waves
of timber stands starving for the sky.
Perhaps after a long walk
the writer stands at a lake’s edge,
to observe fish break through
reflections in the water.
We have been there,
hidden among the songbirds,
warm in a nest wound
from leaf litter,
twigs and muskrat fur.
Our time together is like
a shared cigarette on a castle stair,
such is the intimacy.
Some afternoons,
time is best measured
by the slow pulling apart of clouds
as if they are spun from sugar.
Like nature, we are both living
and dying at the same time.
How quiet it is
while I smell the smoke of you,
here on a grove’s bench.
Away from everything,
you possess me,
such is the privacy
of our picnic.
© 2024 by Peter Coe Verbica
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