Maybe It Was Summer

Maybe I was in love. Maybe Summer Crush was a blush

I wore to complement chlorine streaks in my hair.

It was the year the toddler drowned in our town’s sweet

little creek. Or it was the year after, when the little-girl-

panties were found in a teacher’s coat pocket.

There were whispers among the grown-ups,

or the children dreamed of empty swings, pushed

by a blood-rush breeze. It might have been the season

of coffee ice cream and clove cigarettes. Maybe the smoke

seasicked my gut like a crush. Maybe there was a boy

and two girls. I know I was always the third

body, the one not being touched. Maybe invisibility

is a power, but it felt more like a curse. There may

have been a man camped on the banks of the creek,

beard dreaded and burred. He might have fought

in Vietnam, but it might have been Iraq. Maybe it was June,

and we were told to stay away from him. No,

it was Independence Day and there were gunshots

in the abandoned building. Maybe it had been empty

for centuries. Maybe we mirrored in those windows,

or maybe he left town. Maybe I can’t turn on the lamp

of what happened without illuminating everything

that could have. The lamp was my torso, batman-stamped

to his window. The night above his bed was heavy

with my wanting and he slept little, and then less.

Maybe he was helplessly out of love and I was heartless.

Maybe all I really loved was the space between two people.

Maybe all I wanted to feel was how it shrank. It might have

been the decade of war in a distant country. Or a decade later

when the war was not so distant, but felt no closer

than before. It was the era of wildfire. It was the age of oil

in the estuary. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it was grease

or soot. The birds were snared in something slick

and patent-black. Maybe it wasn’t summer proper,

but the September sibling that flares before the leaves

begin to fall. Maybe the huckleberries were ripe

or maybe sicksweet. Maybe they were plump

as ticks and I burst them between my thumb and finger

one by one. There was the wind of rust

or the wind of slaughter. There was a sickle

moon, a harvest moon. I think I saw a sodden sun

and a glass-float moon, bobbing on opposite horizons.

had set already into a lacquered sea, beach fires

scooping out the night, the dark packed hard between them.

Maybe the dark between was dense enough to scald,

and the glow, like a bioluminescent lure, reminded me

of warmth, but wasn’t warm at all.

Maybe it made me colder.