Hot, rained-on, packed-down straw, strewn then abandoned
between the rows of eggplant, tomato plants, onion, and herbs
catches the evening’s last September gnats in pale mats
and renders, for a moment, the fall surrender untenable.
Impossible, too, to make this sign–your birthday month–
the winding vine of grapes at harvest, for who could drink
in this heat, or light the candles and praise the cake?
The half-century it took to make the man you are is far
outstripped by the tipped and tilting present tense in which
you accurately move, correcting the angle of guyed bamboo,
brushing a confusion of wings from the plot, and not,
in the slightest sense, wincing ahead to the unfathomable,
intolerable winter, for straw, you said, muffles
the living so they can’t hear the dead.
