Heat Wave

poem #124

After a conversation with Isaiah Freeman during a heatwave, June 2026.

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photo by the author

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An hallucinated spell, out of some adept 
who desired a world of solid matter :

but by dint of occult riddles 
in his tongue, we warble in the fluid air—
close our eyes like violets
against the untrained edge of things,
and sit, half-sleeping, for the world
to attain to virtues of the cool desert—
the inviolate stillness of her navy sky,
the night flowers that in their time begin 
the languorous affair again, and rouse us
to our restive, aimless wandering.

*

What is the shape of the sun’s signature
drowning these two locust trees
in its humming, sub-yellow sense?
It is a face open to the degree
that it has no features, the face
open like a predatory flower,
waiting to swallow your head—
the face at the end of the table,
screaming down a funnel of light,
pressing in upon the feast we planted.

*

A goldfinch I said ; a robin she said ;
it is a cardinal a third suggested :
the sun planted three lamps
heavy with their own directions
in our three separate heads, by which
the three of us made to navigate,
like three old men, the ocean of air—
trawling for winged serpents 
over invisible waves
that kiss the drowning roots.

*

Whatever in the tired man, his shining face,
the lady with the flower dress and fragrance
of the lilac in her shadow—
that which survives the day
and then remains with me,
slipping like a wounded swimmer
down, into the violet torpor of the bed ;
all the swelter in the day 
gathered in these pale pilings on the floor,
are bread and broth of oncoming fecundity :

the movement back into the word that moved me,
cooling like a stone when the mirage has fled.