Poets

Kitty Yanson

The evening is all August, and heat

is sprawled against the night

like a cast-off shawl of old brocade

shot with firefly threads, and locusts

spin in trees undaunted,

and the air is swollen with possibility

and pregnant with obscurity.

There will be lightning.

A strike,

an electrical contraction that can

birth a forest fire ablaze.

Humans cannot bear a billion

volts of Life at once.

It would incinerate a house

of self without a lightning rod

on the high roof ridge

to complete the circuit

with its conductive copper wire

into earth, its eloquent titration

of knowing into usefulness and beauty,

planted into ground we can walk upon.

These poets and their silver lines of words,

smelling still of ink and ozone,

imprint a glimpse of August heat

upon a winter’s darkness,

when we know and then forget we know,

and seek to know once more.