Words for Late Summer

Cornmeal, dusted over these loaves 
like pollen. And I wish again 
for the old unwritten recipes: brown breads, 
chicken baked in a wrap of cornmeal, 
family reunion picnics I can’t match 
with my own. 

The french bread I carry instead 
to the park, we layer into sandwiches, 
watch river trees and sky 
dissolving into dusk. 
We are alone above the bank, 
transplanted to this plateau from mountains 
years back. 
Geese along the island 
grow raucous, but their cries turn liquid 
as they reach us, part 
of the river’s molten giving-back 
moments before we lose the sun. 

We stay too long . . . 
one daughter waits darkly in the car 
to be returned to her telephone. 
The other children have disappeared 
with a crackle of reeds down the bank, 
investigating a new dark 
rising from roots and rocks. 

In the last traces of daylight, 
the sky turns the color 
of bruised skin. The voices 

I hear my own, my sisters’ — 
late summer madrigal 
of no bears out tonight and 
mother may I, 
when time was present tense and felt 
through every bone-ache and tendon, 
moments fixed in the certainty 
that smells of baking from wood-stoked ovens 
meant the clarity of dawn, 
that any bruised waking 
could be salved.