watch as lazy sweet days of
cool lake breeze licking at sticky skin

scarlet mandevillas opening their strumpet leaves, wilting, opening again

kissing as raindrops slip down and become a glassy stream (when we breathe our faces, empty and confused, stare up from watery glass)

dancing under sizzling blue light of mosquito lamps

singing your name to the unruly wind (hearing it dissipate, rippling richly across space



&





time)

everything evaporates
like a half glass of French Chardonnay left
out on the wood porch swing

in blistering August sun
(oh there's nothing left but tendrils of the scent of rotten grapes, wrapping round and round the senses, python of tannins, wrangling, strangling)

sometimes, in the fall,
i think of you and blistering August sun.

sometimes, in the fall,
i think
of all the Chardonnay, headier than before,
still left
out on the riviera.