Poem: "The Turn" by Pamela Harrison
The Turn
In the dog days of August, when birdsong defers to the drone of locusts and grasshoppers spring sideways from her step, she stops. Turning in a slow circle, her palms open and upraised to the slanting light of late afternoon, she calls to all her gardens, “Now, my lovelies, you’re on your own.” Quitting her weeding and determined dead-heading, she sits longer in her chair. A gradual slump begins: slugs eat holes in the skirts of hostas, drying pods bend the tops of stalks, garlands of wild grapes wizen in the hedgerow, and the dusty grass turns bleaching into hay. At the deepening drumbeat of autumn, rot overtakes the slow retreat of each perennial form. Bowing to the inevitable, she simply watches and waits, admiring the ambered light, remarking the gradual darkening of evening’s early hours. It’s like riding a long exhalation, the accepting sigh of the earth’s turn toward sleep. A spoil of rotting leaves and insects, heavy and louche, collects at the rain barrel’s bottom. A toad takes refuge in her overturned boot, and her birthday—entirely apt that it falls in the midst of this subsidence—passes blissfully unnoticed, a small forgottenness marked by the sound of ripe tomatoes thudding softly to the ground. |
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Pamela Harrison reads "The Turn" |