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Oh common gaze. Ersatz August of taut fingers. Even the queen of feathers was born from ordinary nature.

When the gang has you licked, do not surrender. In your worst night of dying damsels, weep, but also befriend a tree.

Do not let them gore you of Zen in that worst night, gondolier! Hobble through the grit

thy vest made of spritzer, hops, and the sun’s tears. There, in the back country of friends.

After Rilke (II, 28) by Maggie Nelson

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Witch hazel going wild along the walkway. And all the spots to sit and read our spell books. And all the ways to keep them out. Two black cats and a beaver who eats carrots all day. Every room an upper room even on the ground floor. And bee boxes in the way way back. And the sweet man who comes to keep them. All our loves are witches too. Or warlocks. All our children and all our children. Welcome. Water running in the brook. Clean enough to drink from our hands. And seven sources. And a deep well. All for us and all for those we bring over. Four swings in the branches. A library in every hollow. And birds. So many birds we stop trying to name them. We’ll just let them be with their own names. Maybe they’ll tell us. Porches. Tomatoes in the summer and pumpkins in the fall. And curry leaves and curry blossoms. Jasmine in the rooms at night. All loves protected. All of us playing cribbage on the lawn.

An Inn for the Coven by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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First the mind, then the pain, then the echo. —Adam Gopnik

The Japanese knew well to see life from one remove, to intend spring by writing of snow, or plums in the orchard after a frost.

Like so, I've learned to tell rain by dragonflies in the field, to memorize August by the garden's wild hibiscus, all suspense suspended by the bedrock certainty of what's next.

At the end of a season, my heart grinds the difficult into what can be made plain —first the mind, then the pain— I crank up the levers, the pulleys, the weight,

And then with what speed do I strip away snow, unlearn seasons, flowers' names— the sum of all my losses

vanishing as I run toward the inevitable place: body prior to pain and the weight of the mind,

where I am younger than the world. I become the wild.

The Inevitable Place by Mookie Katigbak

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A black snake plays dead on the path between dogwoods and a meadow of wild Ageratum, pretends to be water-soaked, a fallen branch. Others lie strewn about, their bark-flaked corpses no mirage. All is well, say the midges, dragonflies, moths, ladybugs, even the wind stirring the leaves says to trust instinct’s music. I walk to unravel panic’s thousand fingers braided through my insides—false roots. When I see death I think lose lose lose automatically. The tarot says let go, change. I haven’t read Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, yet; can only take Sharpe’s In the Wake in small doses. I don’t want to drown in ocean math. I narrow my eyes to the scam, don’t move too fast, switch directions then pause—turn back to see what choice the snake makes sans my alarm. In the forest, grief lives a new life as devotion. Early August leaves play at color before surrendering to both man-made ground and messy slopes collecting undergrowth. I wonder what’s past resistance to change, on the other side of fear. If I don’t look down, or walk away. Step over the snake instead, realize both living and dying require giving up.

Tower by Khadijah Queen

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This August evening I’ve been driving over backroads fringed with queen anne’s lace my car startling young deer in meadows—one gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all four fawns sprang after her into the dark maples. Three months from today they’ll be fair game for the hit-and-run hunters, glorying in a weekend’s destructive power. triggers fingered by drunken gunmen, sometimes so inept as to leave the shattered animal stunned in her blood. But this evening deep in summer the deer are still alive and free, nibbling apples from early-laden boughs so weighted, so englobed with already yellowing fruit they seem eternal, Hesperidean in the clear-tuned, cricket-throbbing air.

from Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich

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I.

I don't know how it is where you are now. Mostly, I watch the trees move, Though today they aren't doing much at all, Except this instant when I wrote them down

And they began to sway the way they do When a breeze out of nowhere stirs the air. It seems the wind behaves erratically As if to show us that we cannot say

What is sure without effacing it, Or what is true without assuming light Awakens beside a shadow of doubt.

Do you feel empty because the earth Is full, and does a door slam shut When a gust promises to change you?

from Intervals in Early August by Phillis Levin

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August could ask for better, a hectored meadow, a dross of leaves. Trees are dour in the surfeit side of the year, we are speaking purple to the plumes, which smudge in yellow and pallid plaits of flail. The outlines do not hold, the stitched derisions, in summer seepage I am what and it is we, with my green dress and ticking I am part weed and part machine. Labor of morning, to lock the darkness in. Where does the night go, Ms. Engine, Mr. Mean? Where’s the big-handed washer pures my pie- lipped Rose-of-Rupture, that grow like strident rumor, this smattered year? And the brat of limit with her mottled, filthy fist? This is my letter to losses—swallow it

August could ask by Karen Volkman

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Simmer and drowse of August. And the sheep single file threading a wavering path, because the mood takes them, or took the bellwether, to go this way, not that, the length of the long field. Coarse grass, a powdery green. Hum of bees, heat of noon among seeding thistles. Silver, purple.

Almost bodily something returns, a heavy note of two of sensual music. A moment of milkweed sweetness long past,

a river unseen beyond the field's vague edge.

Without nostalgia, a neutral timelessness. Its shadow, still tight as skin around it, rehearses in silence the message it will deliver later, about time.

Sheep in the Weeds by Denise Levertov

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Only one insect has feasted here, a clear stub of resin plugs the scar. And the hollow where the steam was severed shines with juice. The fur still silvered like a caul. Even in the next minute the hairs will darken, turn more golden in my palm. Heavier, this flesh, than you would imagine like the sudden weight of a newborn. Oh what a marriage of citron and blush! It could be a planet reflected through a hall of mirrors. Or what a swan becomes when a fairy shoots it from the sky at dawn. At the beginning of the world, when the first dense pith was ravished and the stars were not yet lustrous coins fallen from the pockets of night, who could have dreamed this would be curried from the chaos. Scent of morning and sugar, bruise and hunger. Silent, swollen, clefted life, remnant always remaking itself out of that first flaming ripeness.

Ode to the First Peach by Ellen Bass

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Barefoot and sun-dazed, I bite into this ripe peach of a month,

gathering children into my arms in all their sandy splendor,

heaping my table each night with nothing but corn and tomatoes.

August by Linda Pastan (from The Months)

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When the rest of the world seems to be falling apart, from the fool in the white house to the wind and water whipped up in the gulf, the one thing that still seems solid is these peaches, hanging fat and gold on the tree, heavy with sun and rain. When I pull one from the branch, my fingers brushing velvet skin, my lips puckering as if for a kiss, I know I will bite into an ocean of sweetness. All around me, in the late summer garden, bees will be humming their one golden note. And those peaches, hanging like constellations in the leafy sky? In this darkening world, they are the only steady light.

Peaches in August Barbara Crooker

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It takes so little to make me happy: An hour of planting cucumbers squash tomatoes is an hour filled with gold.

We have all lost much of what we thought was safely tucked away: To a dragon called stock market called Wall Street called the economy called despair & wrong choices around the globe.

Still, to be rich in this way: Plentiful seeds of cucumber & squash lettuce & peas to plant; warm sun on my cheek, is to miss the anxiety of loss— its icy silver claw— almost entirely.

Rich by Alice Walker

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Tomatoes are rolling off the vines,

tumbling out of bagfuls over the kitchen tiles

until we lift them into the kettle. Simmering,

skins peel off, expose pink veins tracing over

glistening flesh, seeds

surrounded in juice like yolks of tiny eggs.

Sieving out the pulp

we make sauce save August for November.

I hold you now. We're ripe.

Canning Season by Wendy Barker

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A question the box of earth still asks the kitchen,

as in green blades of Liguria, green

spears of the watery forests of Thailand,

peppery keen airs of August,

as in wise king do not fade,

as in a pot of, where the lover's head

explodes into new ideas, as in

chop the loss finely, add salt and stew

and halo the old charred grandmother stove,

as in what to do with the last

three stained tomatoes hung on the vine.

Basil by Sandra M. Gilbert

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was breathtaking. Sometime in the late 1990s the Californian sun ripened a crop of tomatoes to such a pitch you could hear them screaming. Did I mention this was in California? There was corn on the cob. She was English and her heart almost stopped when her aunt served her a bowl of red and yellow tomatoes so spectacular she would never get over them. I can only imagine the perfectly suspended seeds, the things a cut tomato knows about light, or in what fresh voice of sweet and tart those tomatoes spoke when they told my dearest friend, ‘Yosçi yosçi lom boca sá tutty foo twa tamata,’ in the language of all sun-ripened fruits.

The Tomato Salad by Emily Berry

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Suddenly it is August again, so hot, breathless heat. I sit on the ground in the garden of Carmel, picking ripe cherry tomatoes and eating them. They are so ripe that the skin is split, so warm and sweet from the attentions of the sun, the juice bursts in my mouth, an ecstatic taste, and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer, sloshing in the saliva of August. Hummingbirds halo me there, in the great green silence, and my own bursting heart splits me with life.

Cherry Tomatoes by Anne Higgins

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What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion. What excuse does it need to be this useless, what’s to learn from this inscrutable engine? Why does something in me fly out to the feathery tree, whirring so hungrily toward translucence?

After the Storm, August by Gail Mazur