August in Maine
I watch you sitting on the dock, face to the sun,
dangling your bronzed legs in the warm lake water.
The sun has risen over the hill on the opposite shore,
farther along its day-by-day southward creep.
Its rays play differently through the panes, leaving
patches of light where they don’t belong
in this summer cottage.
Yet its warmth steals the night’s chill,
draws me to the porch windows even
as the ashes of last evening’s fire are still warm.
I hoist the wooden window frames overhead;
latch them to the ceiling, blur the boundary
between outdoors and in, as fresh air flows
through the screen porch.
A yellow leaf swirls down from the birch.
Across the cove, a spot of red where
the trees are bleeding – prematurely –
but only by a moon’s cycle. And still you sit,
pensive, lost to me.
And what are you pondering, Daughter?
Maybe you’re listening to the crickets’ song –
the long rising buzz of insect wings, a chord
that binds us in this late August melancholy.
Gazing at your back – your silhouette
more woman than girl now – I remember
how your sleepy infant eyes learned to focus
on this scene. How I bathed you in these waters,
listening to the bullfrogs and small splashes
of fish jumping. And now I wonder:
Are you, too, grieving
the end of a season?
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Puckerbrush Review, the literary journal of the University of Maine, in 2012. It is dedicated to my mother, Elaine Quinlan.
I watch you sitting on the dock, face to the sun,
dangling your bronzed legs in the warm lake water.
The sun has risen over the hill on the opposite shore,
farther along its day-by-day southward creep.
Its rays play differently through the panes, leaving
patches of light where they don’t belong
in this summer cottage.
Yet its warmth steals the night’s chill,
draws me to the porch windows even
as the ashes of last evening’s fire are still warm.
I hoist the wooden window frames overhead;
latch them to the ceiling, blur the boundary
between outdoors and in, as fresh air flows
through the screen porch.
A yellow leaf swirls down from the birch.
Across the cove, a spot of red where
the trees are bleeding – prematurely –
but only by a moon’s cycle. And still you sit,
pensive, lost to me.
And what are you pondering, Daughter?
Maybe you’re listening to the crickets’ song –
the long rising buzz of insect wings, a chord
that binds us in this late August melancholy.
Gazing at your back – your silhouette
more woman than girl now – I remember
how your sleepy infant eyes learned to focus
on this scene. How I bathed you in these waters,
listening to the bullfrogs and small splashes
of fish jumping. And now I wonder:
Are you, too, grieving
the end of a season?
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Puckerbrush Review, the literary journal of the University of Maine, in 2012. It is dedicated to my mother, Elaine Quinlan.
