May This Time

The sun repeats its course. Exactly ten or eleven years to the day, more like than not, this shade of orange gold wrapped around the building fronts and shadowing underpasses. The grass was this high, crazy high, ecstatic wild but not crawling, not yet. It’s still too cool.

The sun repeats its course. Autumn and spring feel like the same thing if you all-of-a-sudden wake up in the middle of one, like regaining consciousness in the in-between light. Dawn? Dusk? Does your body feel when it comes out of the west?

The sun repeats its course. Exactly ten or eleven or so years ago, more than likely, this particular wavelength of sunset radiated off the deep dark windows in the closed-up stores, the shells of factories. And people were driving around, paying much too little for gas.

The sun repeats its course, exactly enough to turn the crescent-handled deadbolted doors on memories stored eleven to twelve distant years ago. The same dim spot in the lee of Bamber’s Superette. But now there are gilded weeds straining in that abandoned parking lot. You know it maybe, the chain-fenced one across from Raco?

The sun repeats its course. Maybe not to the micron, but to the aging eyes. Close enough for me to weave a random weedy vine through my back fence, in the dim of the lee of Alvin’s garage. The bare fields like bald spots edged in wild green hair, the highest plants catching light like eleven and twelve and thirteen years before.

This shade of orange gold… I know it so well. I want to disappear into it, with it. There are so many green strawberries, so many more white blossoms, on my in-laws planted rows. We both want the same thing: summer.

The sun repeats its course. I repeat an oath under my breath as I walk down the office hallway, in the last hour of my day. This was earlier. I find that if I say the first line, I am compelled to say the rest. Something like Franny and her automatic prayer. It’s the oath of someone who is trying to be good. I repeat it. The sun grows lower,

and cottonwood fluff hits the Saint Joseph River, until its like caramel and dust.