Poem for Saturday and Mount Vernon Balloon

After Morning Rain
By Sam Hamill

A few small sails, barely moving,
dot Fidalgo Bay. As the sun burns away
the last pale clouds, a confluence
of robins descends to explore
my neighbor’s garden—
brown grass, muddy beds and the last
fading roses of the year.

It is September, the end of summer.
My backyard maples turning orange
and red and gold. From my high window,
the great mountain looks
painted on the horizon line,
small mountains at its feet, then
headlands and the Salish Sea below.

I can read no more today
about the agonies of this world,
its desperate refugees, the men
of arms and gold whose death tolls
are as numberless as the stars.
I’ve grown weary, impatient,
as I’ve grown old.

After this morning’s rain, I dream
only of a woman’s gentle laughter,
her fingers on my arm as we sip wine
in the evening, telling tales,
lighting the heart’s small fires
that will get us through the rains
of autumn and dark winter.

Alone at my window, I watch
a silent world and find it
welcome, my own silence welcome.
Longing has its own quiet place
in the human heart, but love
is sometimes rapturous, noisy,
almost uncivilized, and knows
no boundaries, no borders.

And what am I but its solitary
pilgrim—lost, found, lost again—
on the long journey whose only end
is silence before the burning
of my body, one last moment
of flame, a whiff of smoke
washed clean
and gone with the rain.

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Friday was overcast for much of the day and then it rained, so I didn't go anywhere exciting. I decided to upload the rest of our 2016 Seattle trip pictures since I'd started before Facebook pulled the bait-and-switch on me, and because I had to individually change the dates and locations on every single photo, that took pretty much the entire afternoon.

We watched the musical Fame since Andrew Lloyd Webber put it on his YouTube channel, and it was all right, but mostly it made me nostalgic for the movie, which it braver about both growing up gay and hanging tough to be an actress (I feel like the musical was written for high school students to perform) so I'm watching that now. Balloon launch at the Colonial Fair: