The Hill: Summer

 

1.

Running in circles—
the black dog, yellow flowers,
day’s eye opening…

How to distinguish
the porcelain-berry vine
in earliest June?

Echoes of echoes—
turtles basking on warm stones
in late June sunlight.

So the raspberries
turn out to be wineberries—
less sugar, same thorns.

June into July, 
huge beds of tiger lilies,
morning on the hill.

Two pink peonies
bent to the ground by rain,
the black dog barking.

2.

The black dog pulling
at the leash by the meadow
where the deer emerge.

Magnolia blossoms
in deepest, rich, green, green dusk—
glory of July.

Glory of July—
fireflies more beautiful
than the fireworks.

It’s taken over
Larry’s old tomato patch—
a crabapple tree.

Whoever planted
this bamboo was a husband
to profligacy!

We cannot know it—
insatiability—
as sunflowers do.

3.


Untended flowers,
azaleas smothered in vines,
richness, wildness, loss.

Wild and untended,
how poems grow in the mind—
hot day in August.

Treehouse overgrown
with vines, the kids home all day,
playing Nintendo.


Is it still summer—
yellow leaves in shaggy grass,
age spots on my shins.

Bees and bumblebees
hovering over clover,
bumblebees and bees.

Cool night, late August,
and the porcelain berries
slowly turning blue.


Cambell McGrath

Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago, Seven Notebooks, XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, and most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 2019).  He has received numerous literary prizes for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in scores of literary reviews and quarterlies. Born in Chicago, he lives with his family in Miami Beach and teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished University Professor of English.

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