A REVERIE

Some days in August there’s a summer hum

Of distant outboard motors, or a plane

Relentlessly pursuing a puffed cloud,

Echoes of past revelers, and then some

More silent moments, full of what’s to come –

Waves I will see crash shores, cold driving rain,

Fast traffic on the highway; droning, loud,

Insistent in its unrelenting thrum –

The acquiescent sere, last drooping mum.

It’s then I ask if summer can explain

Or lift from everything the brittle shroud

Which now has fallen on it. Still, in sum,

I see the cartwheel of the seasons roll

Know they are but the backdrop for the whole.

— This poem appears in the November 3, 2014, print issue of National Review.