Junebugs gleam green, thwack loud athwart the eaves
and any other thing that blocks their way. The doctor said
the other day this growing haze is just my focal distance
in the prelude to its ebb, and last night when we rode
our bikes far out to Island Home, I squinted at the roofs,
tried to remember which was my department head’s,
thought of that time two decades back when I was the sole
graduate there for a spring soiree, not having checked
with any of my cohort prior, and so for an entire blue
evening I perspired and flushed with youth and shame
among the giants in my field, tasting for the first time
a few dishes of that land: green beans still crisp in dark
and bitter oil, laced with seeds I tasted later, their having stuck
between my teeth, and pale red wine that dried my tongue,
and cheeses sharp with salt and earth. A story I heard later:
the head was never more in shape than in the year or two
he wrote his book on Joyce, and rowed the Puget Sound
and pedaled his fast bike around the capes and coves.
Likewise, that lurid bite a friend fed me later still, that once
this scholar’s wife (a prof herself) confided with a smirk
he came home one day so redolent of sweat and effort
that, ravished, she crushed him to her – it was just nature
doing its work to ripen desire – and how shocked
I was at this frank talk of sex among the middle-aged,
unknowing yet of how my thirties would unfold, the jolt
of learning my body, too, has its quiet but insistent need.
Prone as I am now in a hammock, my softer-these-days
stomach looks for the moment taut under my shirt, though then
it fills with air and flattens out again, a landscape changing
every minute. This house, which we bought last summer
from two young folks with kids (which we will never bear
ourselves), and which they bought in turn from a still older pair
who first built it, has new cracks from our first year of settling.
We sleep and dance and eat and drink as deeply as we dare
from these vessels in which we likewise find ourselves.
At night in groups the local kids ride bikes right past our lawn.
We watch them pick up speed, to feel the rush of that steep slope
that winds its blind and swift way down to the main road.