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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Heat Wave

The heat is crowding us,
pushing us into our houses.
The meridian of high summer
with the furnace of the sun.
Trees panting as the grass grows brown,
and stillness
invades the shadows.
Not a sound.
Not a whisper.
As if the birds had flown away
leaving an unfilled sadness
behind them,
their wings dissolved in the heat.

The flowers droop in maidenly shyness,
bowed as if an unknown suitor
were passing by.
But his eyes have the iridescence
of a cat.
He is silent,
and ignores their modesty.
I fan myself,
and long for the cool water
of a boy.
The sails I remember as a boy
in the darkness of the house.
How the breeze lifted the spirit,
combed itself through my hair,
and summer was a woman
in a diaphanous dress,
revealing her legs,
sensuous as clouds
going to sleep in the sky.

Published inIndex of all Poems