A Summer Kind Of Sad

Good lord, the stars, the dusty, glimmering sprawl above some dark, quiet place in America, the stardust, star-scatter, the worlds stretched up there above this one.

Remember? Remember standing on a gravel road in Vermont –along a big river in a Montana valley, on a dock jutting out into a lake in the Adirondacks, at the edge of the ocean in Oregon– watching stars shake loose and heave themselves down the sky? Remember standing in the damp country in Michigan, in Minnesota, in Iowa, in Illinois, watching fireflies wheel and tumble above the black fields?

I remember.

I also remember –where the hell was it?– the old man wobbling aboard a bicycle who emerged like a vision through the ground fog, paused to wish us a good evening, and quoted Thucydides: “They have the numbers; we the heights.”

I remember the wind whistling through open car windows and the hum-thumpa-hum of tires on the pavement of dark highways and music carrying in the darkness and the bright lights of carnival rides whirling on the horizon and days and nights so permeated with wonder that they leeched the words right out of me and left every letter of the alphabet in fuzzed and uselessly abstract isolation fluttering from a clothesline stretched across the roof of my skull while backyard sprinklers shook their maracas up and down the block of my old neighborhood and I drifted all night at the margins of sleep.

What explanation is given for the phosphorous light

That you, as boy, went out to catch

When summer dusk turned to night.

You caught the fire-flies, put them in a jar,

Careful to let in the air,

Then you fed them dandelions, unsure

Of what such small and fleeting things

Need, and when

Their light grew dim, you

Let them go.

There is no explanation for the fire

That burns in our bodies

Or the desire that grows, again and again,

So that we must move toward each other

In the dark.

We have no wings.

We are ordinary people, doing ordinary things.

The story can be told on rice paper.

There is a lantern, a mountain, whatever

We can remember.

Hiroshige’s landscape is so soft.

What child, woman, would not want to go out

Into that dark, and be caught,

And caught again, by you?

Let these pictures of the floating world go on

Forever, but when

This light must flicker out, catch me,

Give me whatever a child imagines

To keep me aglow, then

Let me go.

—Siv Cedering, “Ukiyo-E”