March was what I wanted. September is what I got. Heat everywhere. No let-up. Dead grass and a broken, post-apocalyptic sidewalk with us needing a rain or at the very least a wet cloud.. Overhead, chilly worlds float.
My head flies up.
I only wish to cool off. Like Mme. Récamier who appears in biographies as a glacial, self-contained woman, dispassionate, incapable of serious attachment, in a word, French. But I don't want enlightenment; I only want to walk an arctic sidewalk and maybe remember the day of the week.
Today, for example, could be the 20th or the 38th but mainly it's another hot day gone in which I once again discover sweating and how what all anybody wants is not art but an breeze and an ear tuned in to them. Here. Stand under this fan. Be amused by a few ill winds. Listen.
Choose the weather you prefer.
This is your absolute choice, your victimless crime.
You are in charge. The way you pick
the light that slaps your cheek into a rufus heat.
Step off the curb into a thunderstorm or count
to 100 by Celsius or Fahrenheit. Decide to hold
licked fingers to the wind or make a bowl
out of your palms for snowflakes, later
sweat in an incorrigible sun. The weather
invites a dance, choose that.
I look out through mother's face.
Many women do this
We own what we have done, garden gloves,
movie popcorn, a Thesaurus.
Her reflection hides inside mine as an alternate
image like the little Compos inside Pessoa.
A month since she wasn't, she stays alert
in my mirror, eyes opaque, I ask a question,
get no response, only reflection.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives on the edge of Texas with one foot in Arkansas. She is the author of two books, Reading Berryman to the Dog (2000) and Discount Fireworks (2008). She has two published chapbooks: After Happily Ever After (2River Chapbook Series) and The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press). Her work is included in several anthologies: The Poets Grimm, (2003), Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas, ed. Naomi Shihab Nye, (2004) and Letters to the World, eds. Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and Lesley Wheeler, (2007) and others. Her poems have appeared in 2River View, Salt River Review, Cider Press Review, Aquila, Bent Pin Quarterly and elsewhere. Further notes about her poems on line and in print appear on her website WendyTaylorCarlisle.com.
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