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.