Poem for Saturday, UMCP Sheep, Change of Heart

Summer Solstice
By Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

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Happy Midsummer! I had what is becoming a pretty standard summer Friday. Paul worked from home because the van was getting its A/C fixed and because we were going to retrieve Daniel in the afternoon, I spent the morning working on a review of Deep Space Nine's "Change of Heart", my favorite Worf episode in 10+ years of him on Star Trek, then we had lunch together. I had to go pick up Adam from the slumber party he attended after the Super Smash Bros. tournament the night before, but he was quickly out again to go swimming, then home long enough to shower and go to another party.

The rest of us got home from College Park after swinging by the farm to see the sheep (we also saw several geese and deer near the woods), picked up the van, then went to my parents' for dinner. I listened to more World Cup than I actually saw, but it was not a great sports day for anyone I was rooting for anyway -- the Orioles lost to the Yankees and the Nationals lost to Atlanta, so it is just as well that we weren't watching either of those games! Instead we were watching more Orphan Black, which has so many fantastic women! Here are some of the sheep trying to keep cool at the University of Maryland campus farm: