Dog Days

artwork: ralph murre

Dog Days

by Susan Elbe

July 5

In Utah, no one can sleep.

Millions of crickets five inches deep

trill like frenzied schoolgirls

speaking in tongues. In New York,

tripped alarms slam the air.

Someone wrenches open a hydrant

and blistering streets sizzle with steam.

Here, the heat leaches you of story

and radiance. Hard work, this

mucking through silence and sleep

so seamless no dream can unzip it,

not even an old ghost to tear at its threads

with long fingernails of memory.

July 20

This is how you want it—summer

forever, the sky, blue and lucent

as the moonstone of a baby’s eyes

and clean, white sheets

you lie down on at night,

someone outside on his way home,

whistling an old tune—

See the pyramids along the Nile. . .

while you slowly cross

the wobbly bridge to sleep

and somewhere behind clouds,

the dog star drops

off the edge of this cockeyed earth.

August 1

This is how it is—at 2 a.m. still 80°,

the air murky with dank breath

and fishy lake smell. The carp moon

belly-flopped in the sky. A lignin

of sweat cements you to the sheets.

Angled with shadow, the street

shifts like dream, turns a different face.

Stalling neon thips and fizzles, faded

to the hollow-heart pink of strawberries.

Toward morning, blue crackle, thunder,

rain pattering through the leaves

like a small dog’s toenails on linoleum.

That dumb darling, your huge need,

lazy and bloated with heat, lies

beside you, panting in its thick pelt of fur.

August 2

The cicadas and light this morning

rattle in the leaves like brass keys.

Last night’s rain trickles

from the eaves in long, silver strings.

Shucking sweet corn,

your fingers are slippery with silk.

Daddy longlegs traipse in all the corners.

Already so much starts to fall away

from the deep green, too-lush days

that prickle like stiff crinoline.

Imagine 20 years from now. Then,

with luck, 20 more. Loss is a dry well,

empty pocket.  It needs filling.

August 5

Not yet dusk, not yet

the underwater-blue time,

but the brief half-hour after sunset

when you glow inside out,

your slow-finned heart leaping

clear of fear, worry, what holds it

to this fraught world.

You give the devil his due

each time you care too much

about what doesn’t matter.

Something dark unwinds, snakes

up into the windrowed light.

August 7

Nothing keeps in this weather. Tomatoes

wrinkle and split. Cucumbers soften

and snap beans rust. Salt won’t pour.

The first dream in weeks begins.

God asks me what I want.

I say I’m lonely. Give me poems.

I’m hungry. Can I have the moon?

I say nothing is enough. Let me live

forever this life that exhausts

and scares me witless, yet brings me

daily to my knees in thanks.

But God turns up the underside of a leaf

and there’s death, riding

like a soft cocoon along the vein.

~ first published in CALYX

It Happens in This Latitude

photo: ralph murre

It Happens in This Latitude

by Susan Elbe

Here a loose chain of hills fences in

our eccentricity, a penance

of blood deeper than ground water.

Born inside this geography,

held by stubborn faith, we plough

and plant great fields of corn,

believing the soul of the diligent

shall be made fat. But sometimes

after storm the air turns green,

pale as katydid wings,

and a legerdemain of light pulls us

shimmering from this land’s rough sleeve.

Our solitary blood rises up,

tribal at the core. We drink the light

like we drink our whiskey—neat

and burning all the way down.

We husk the silky-haired corn, dance

on good black earth, our souls

filled with the dumb luck of summer

until the light begins to close

back on itself and something in us

wants winter. One by one,

we slip over the hills to mewl

in the body's dark shelter once more.

~ first published in The Laurel Review

HANDBOOK

scarecrow: ralph murre

Handbook
by Susan Elbe

Go out into the corn's green arms.
Let its silk slip
. . . . . . through your fingers.

You won't need it.
This is rougher work.

Stand there among the dark wings,
in the middle of their chaos,
. . . . . . . . . . . . yawp and thievery.

Find the blueprint in a blackbird's eye:
. . . . . . your own pupil-startled eyes
. . . . . . . . . . . .reflecting back at you,
. . . . . . your summer-frizzled hair,
. . . . . . your limbs limp from lifting
. . . . . . . . . . . the world's heavy bales.

Scavenge—cloth, mud, denim, chaff.
. . . . . . For this task,
. . . . . . . . . . . . soft silhouettes work best.

Give it wildness and bewilderment.
Lend it terror with a heart stuffed full
. . . . . . . . . . . . .of threshed hopes.

Kiss a mouth on with your own
. . . . . . jam-smeared, crooked mouth

Give in when bargaining begins, this existence
. . . . . . . . . . . . moving fire to fire,
straw to tinder, sleeve to kindle,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . memory to miracle.

You're the noon betrayer.
. . . . . . . . . .Understand
you will be monstrous to those
. . . . . . . . . . . . .whose quarrel you reject.

Come back when the wind turns red
and the moon is just a whisper.

Climb the shaky ladder. Lift the hand-hewn,
. . . . . .time-slacked soul above
. . . . . . . . . . . the cracked earth,
hung as if you pinned it to the star-pricked sky.

You will want no down-on-bended-knee,
no set jaw, no tears or finger-pointing.

Prepare to be lonely.

You're the made-in image.
In this field, you're the god.


~ first published in Goodreads