September
       

For once clouds come to mark the day and one boy
tries to explain the sky with physics.
He will kneel this way for hours, weighted down
by pockets full of green glass and agate.
Because there is no wind the clouds persist
and the other boy knows he is being shown
a kind of mercy, as when a great force
hits something smaller but leaves it intact.
The trees are just as bright, just as near turning.
His street lifts the same way along the park,
but he cannot see the rest of the day
this small season was built around. From their hands
marbles fan across the sidewalk.
Most go where they are meant to
and the boy on his knees calls out the names
of obscure constellations. If he stares long enough,
he can torture patterns from the scattered glass:
first Carina, then the entire Argo Navis.
The other boy imagines living in a city built of clouds.
Every other green marble flies toward the grass.
Already birds are beginning to thin themselves out
and the blunt sound of helicopters
weaves less distinctly through a silence.
The grass is full of tiny eyes.
A patch of blue is forming as if a day can be replicated,
in all of its stillness, its clarity not of this earth.

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Copyright © 2014 Lorraine Doran All rights reserved
from Phrasebook for the Pleiades
Cider Press Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission