Summer Suite
Chris Ellery
June 23, 2024
Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
1. League
She said she loved
how I printed my name
on my glove.
Simple lines without flourish.
Elegant. So unlike
how I moved
to scoop up grounders
in the infield,
all bowed legs and windmill arms
and elbows,
scribbling chaos
along the baseline
like an indecipherable
calligraphy
adapted from some dead
Semitic language.
In baseball you have to learn
the shortest distance
between two places,
like where you stand
between first and second
and where you can catch
the hard-hit liner.
Somehow I could never get
to the point
directly.
A league is how far
a horse can walk
in an hour,
a crow leaves no tracks
on the sky
for the horse to follow.
I loved how she said she loved
how I drew wild,
superfluous
doodles on the diamond,
winding and weaving my way
20,000 leagues
under a pop up to catch
the falling white orb
of a fleeting
summer.
2. Ripening
One rootbound summer of my adolescence
I spent in the orchard picking peaches, every tree
a galaxy of ripening suns.
Morning and afternoon I could feel my own body
ripening. Day by day I could feel my hands
being molded to the shape of a succulent harvest.
Every day as the shadows grew long in the Hill Country
I savored one perfect, tree-ripe sample of the season—
a dense little globe of rainfall, earth, and light.
How juicy and sweet the fruit, still warm from the sun!
How tender the flesh, how eager to pull away
from the stone!
3. Narrow
The way Rousseau threw rocks at trees I play a little game with myself.
If the lawn mower starts by the third pull I’m saved forever—
or at least all day.
Something about the promise of the manicured lawn makes me believe
that I have heaven
tethered at the end of the chord.
It must be
all that green appearing at my feet
like a country club fairway in the wake of the whirling blade.
It must be
those narrow lines my mower traces on the grass,
sunshine crisscrossing in the perfect mandala of perpendiculars and curves.
To the rhythm of the rpms I plan my memoir—How It Should Have Been,
and Is, my working title—as the lawn recalls the wilderness
it once was.
It’s always always always Saturday afternoon.
Catching all the clippings in a bag like imperfections,
my mower revises every tale by Updike, Irving, Fitzgerald.
No conflict. No catharsis. No tears. No accusations. No divorce.
Just bliss bliss bliss in the suburbs.
When my friends and I play catch, the hard ball always hits the sweet spot of the mitt.
The pigskin arcs across the sky with a tight spiral.
Lawn darts, croquet, and bocce ball while the smoker billows with no tincture of Gehenna.
To offer a sweet libation of her own making, my own Thérèse, my dear Madame de Warens
crosses the fresh-cut grass,
appearing like a firefly on a summer evening.
I bloom like a yellow iris of April.
4. Heart
This knife slices open a memory.
My father spreads the table with newspapers
and plops down a watermelon
fat as Falstaff’s thirst.
Three decades later,
with all my children watching,
I take up the knife and slide the blade
again and again along the rod
in the ritual of sharpening.
We hear the rind splitting
as the keen edge glides through ripeness,
then all seize a slice, eager
to sheathe our faces in sweetness.
Out under the live oaks,
savoring sunshine with the lips of summer,
we spit the black seeds on the grass.
Like my father before me
I hold a wedge in both my hands
and eat from the ends, saving the heart for last.
5. A Dying Oak
yellowjackets
cloud
around a hollow limb
termites
channel through rings
of a hundred summers
a woodpecker
lights
with its noisy drill
may I also
as long as I am
be cheerful and giving
6. Lake
My wife and our children and their children
are playing on the beach. Their voices join
with the voice of Conifer Lake, their breath
with pine trees breathing the summer air.
When last I was here, the inlet where we swim
today was frozen. The waves were broken
into shards of ice. Even then it seemed a miracle
to walk across. The lake was groaning.
I thought of fish looking up from under the ice.
Fish, I am told, are forgetful. They wouldn’t recall
my steps overhead if I’d ambled above on a stormy
summer day plucking men from the waves.
If fish are the unconscious of a lake, I can’t
expect this lake to remember if it was afraid
that day that it couldn’t bear my weight. Well,
I was afraid. Nevertheless, I say to the lake:
One winter day I chose to cross on ice.
You held me up and delivered me
to a sunny evergreen shore
which I could never have reached by any other way.
7. Moon and Month of Oak
June, the month that welcomes the oak moon,
brings triple digit days to the Concho Valley,
the end of my seventh decade on the planet.
Days before the blistering solstice
I mow the grass under a shady sombrero.
Claws of sunlight, filtered through oak leaves,
scratch at my bare white legs, basted in sunscreen.
Scared from the compost pile when I turn it,
a prairie lizard scampers up a nearby live oak
to watch me put away the mower
and turn on the hose to dampen the fresh clippings.
He doesn’t seem too worried
about carbon emissions and global warming,
but who knows?
Showered and changed, I dare to eat
a Fredericksburg peach
for lunch outside beside a bed of succulents.
This is my way of welcoming summer,
welcoming once again the month and moon of oak,
reaching out to my eighth decade on the planet
like the red yucca stretching their slender stems
to the brightest rays.
Chris Ellery is a member of the Texas Association of Creative Writers, the Fulbright Association, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His poetry collections include The Big Mosque of Mercy, Elder Tree, and the forthcoming One Like Silence. The later poetry of Pablo Neruda has been a major influence on his recent work, including "Summer Suite."
