September 3

How did this summer day become this–
cool, bright, hopeful?

Tulip Poplar leaves mottle the driveway,
having turned color already here in 
South Central Pennsylvania, which is 
somehow also the Northeast, 

and I’m sitting and sipping coffee
tossing frisbees for our dogs and it’s 
only eleven degrees Celsius, 
as if summer’s clutch slipped 
and burned into fall–

AKA fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, 
a word I’m surprised I can even spell, 
and using the metric system can get you 
killed around here, 

but as an act of rebellion 
I’ve switched my device settings
to centigrade, 

and also because my youngest son 
now lives in Italy,
so when we go and visit I’ll quickly 
know whether I should put on a jacket
when the weather is fourteen degrees

as I go to walk those cobblestone streets in 
Firenze, wearing a baseball cap and
my feet to dust, Acanthus leaves already 
turned to stone

and for some reason Florence has two
names just as the weather has two
temperatures and summer is also fall

and I’m both frangible and sturdy 
and if I look carefully 
Janus is carved 
above every open door

I’m experimenting a bit here–I did not turn the poem into a picture. Instead I simply pasted it here into the browser window and will hope that the formatting stays in place.

My line lengths are fairly short, so I think it will be ok.

This poem was inspired by the poem “June 11” by David Lehman. If you read both I think you’ll see some parallels.

I struggled a bit today having not written a poem in a couple of weeks. Shaking the cobwebs out.

The summer feels over now, not just because of the cool days, but because my son has gone off to his senior year of college and we have the house to ourselves again.

I’m off to do projects now–I created a flagstone fire pit patio this weekend which came out pretty nice. I used cobblestone for the edges–the word cobblestone used here came to mind because of this.

Today it’s time to work on the garage, making space and organizing.

Here’s the poem as an image, btw: