When the Dewpoint is High
July becomes a box of water,
one made of cardboard that seeps,
inside out, outside in. If August
is the Sunday of summer, July
is Wednesday—middle child
simmering. There is no Thursday
month-summer. I forget the gods
whose names we’ve borrowed
for time. I forget which people
created them. But I know
in summer, I pine for waves—
water over land impartial: rocks
eroded to sandy tears, mud
the mating of silt & clay,
humus an orgy of oak & ash,
buckthorn & maple, all dead,
all resting. I’ll float above
them all, that plethora of textures
bottoming waters—those lakes,
& ponds, rivers & oceans holding
us in. Submerge and resurface.
Maybe all gods are swimmers—
so much closer are we to holiness
in the depths of the bodies we choose.
*
The Gusts Reached 60mph
and then the power went out. Leaving us
in a darkness resembling our lives, the pitch
of your voice when it drives to cut, to fissure
a wound as deep as the temper that craves
to carve it. There is rain in December
in Maine, a downpour of confusion
as much spectacle as menace. We kept
waiting: for the lights to flicker,
for the hum of white noise to fade,
for that power to finally go out.
I no longer set aside candles. The matches
stay in the drawer. I’m used to these storms.
I know how to prepare, but I’m tired.
This one too will pass. The sun will return,
heating too hot a ground that should be
dormant. Frozen. Listen, I know now: night
is a shield of darkness that I’ve learned
to rest with. To hide within its corners.
To wait. Then walk in the thick mud
of another season’s morning.
*
Michelle Menting lives across a questionable bridge in rural Maine. Her poems, flash fictions, and flash nonfictions have appeared in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Tar River Poetry, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in midcoast Maine.