A wave’s white flag unfurls against the headland.
We’re pleased with summer’s long foreseen surrender:
hot noons betrayed by maples fringing umber,
horny insects dying in the wetlands.
You said how often pleasure reads as loss—
The pale moths of our nights mating in long
grass until their sailcloth bodies fall
apart. That will be the way we gloss
a season, the way I call your legs
laid down together a horizon close to dawn,
or you my beard a tangle of black weeds.
For both of us, the ocean’s tannin dregs
spell out September. But you. I won’t rely on
myths to frame you. Of fame you have no need.
Proserpine
