Ephemera

The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then we lose it in the pond grass, lashed among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles, my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted), a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift that here will linger long enough for us to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung, to get the hang of happiness and get going. Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment, which is why I want it monumental, equestrian, astride, however I can get it. What’s passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back intact, all its receptors set on July.