Chronoscope 245: Sunday has been

August late afternoon:
an ecstasy of glitter darting bugs
Sunday has been dirt and sweating
and shoving and kicking and raking
and leveling red mulch.

What was that almost all black butterfly
that hesitated at the purple verbena blooms
before flying away?

A distant child screeches
like her voice is part
of the wind in the trees

is part of the pollen, the warmth
across the green neighborhood.

I eat a cherry tomato sunburst
right off the vine.
I bite into an interrupted carrot
brushed of dirt:
an intensity of earth
and fiber and crispness.

So let’s grab a couple bottles
of nice white wine.

How about that Basque
that just tastes like the evaporation 
of a somewhere else summer rain storm?

I’ll build a fire to light the underside 
of the canopy trees.

We can ignore how illness 
breathing has isolated us
from the world.

JOHN WALSER

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, South Dakota Review, Plume, Posit, Stone Circle Review, and One Art. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.