currently love

In honor of today's humid, gray, and sort of gross weather. And in honor of sitting in the backyard with cold beer tonight, after the last unpacking and lugging of Rubbermaid containers and figuring out why the freezer is 42 degrees. And in honor of me remembering that the first few days after a move are always a gigantic clusterfuck, and to just calm down and settle.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Hoagland, and a poem that always makes me think of Kato and summer and change.

Jet
Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

from Donkey Gospel