The sun leaning south has a slow drawl,
drawing out the day’s vowels,
taking longer to say but still saying it.
It’s the end of summer, petals closing up,
the bones in my wrists the first to feel
the possibility of frost.
What I’ve read and remember pleases me
but has little use—Solzhenitsyn’s sister
calling cats the only true Christians
or Aldous Huxley, impatient with the coolness
of Virginia Woolf, her meanness to a friend,
writing in a letter, She’s a jar of ashes.
I wish I’d saved my father’s, sealed some
in an egg timer and used it as a measure,
following the sun’s slide across the windowsill,
in slow ease into night. I’m looking more like him,
my face getting thinner, m lips more pinched.
Still, I love the way the sun moves
around lobelia, anemone, geranium,
words lasting longer on the warmth
and thickness of its tongue.
~ from Whetstone (McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 2005)
