Sultry Summer

Robert Ronnow
The Ever Maddening Mandala

Sultry Summer

1

The government plans to launch a space mirror to illuminate all the dark places on earth.
Sweet night is already violated by streetlights, parking lot lights, motion detector lights,
headlights and taillights, old ladies who leave apartment lights on all night,
theater company lights, landscapes lit by sunlight, get warm with wine and turn out the lights.
Skyscraper lights, the mind lights at random, Friday night lights,
Hades where the lights are always blue, gentian actually.
Myriad lights in buildings large enough to hold a small town,
lights out change engines while the train prepares for departure.

2

Doom scrolling is entertaining. I sometimes pray for man’s destruction.
But in any conceivable scenario I can come up with, doom subsumes me.
No way do I have a realistic sense of what it means to stop breathing.
Stay near the earth people that’s the way to grow old. Don’t fly.
Be where you are, that’s my advice.
Civilizations are transitory, trading and taking. Humanity is lonely.
Please complete your migration from who you are to who you’re gonna be.
Or be satisfied with incompletion.

3

A comedy about a songwriter whose song is stolen by a megastar.
How you can lose perspective, drive your car off the road with your wife and daughter in it.
I left midway to take a phone call from my son
whose prospective employer did a background check and found his felony
so withdrew their offer. You get a tragedy and a comedy, everything you ever wanted in a
lifetime.
Before that we attended a dance concert, something about death and reincarnation.
I like unison dancing and unison playing. Being in unison gives a sense of order and control.
People doing together what cannot be done alone, or well.

4

Hot, so what. Go slow as the day will allow, owe no explanation to society.
Poems are effete although a lot of people, even manly men, read them secretly,
searching for the prize answer, cellulose, muscle, photosynthesis, their mothers or fathers
in their dazed lovers’ eyes, significance, wanting meaning, weapons or insurgents
(there’s no percentage in respecting death unless it’s imminent),
an echo from the abyss, symbols in a town without a river,
outer space for an entity to unite us as humanity.
Grace is what you get no matter what.

5

Take AI’s poem about the crow and the sea gull competing for a fast food
burger king roll squished in a parking lot. It ends with the crow winning
and scanning the lot with a watchful eye. I write to AI
the crow should scan the lot with an eagle eye.
To be more crow, praise the pure contralto and be great with enemies satisfied.
Shwartz is coming Friday, what will we talk about.
Suppose we sit in silence for days, two ancient Chinamen.
Suppose I disappear before Shwartz appears.

6

He not busy being born is busy dying.
Smelting, forging, milling, fencing, thatching, dyeing.
Cleaning and driving.
Hoping happiness outgrows fear by an ounce or enough.
Thrashing the earth to within an inch of its life.
America is hell on earth
or it is a learning environment created jointly by the souls that share it.
Put up a parking lot.

7

Not even New York City has the number of murders in a typical police procedural.
Writing badly is the best riposte to all you do not know. Emerson said that.
I’m just killing time until it’s time to get my daily numbers. How many
people read my poems yesterday. A silly goal for a man almost old as Da Liu, Li Po or Lao-tzu.
Correcting our mistakes won’t be easy because our mistakes want to live just like the rest of us,
traveling, singing, climbing, plumbing, tropically flowering.
A belated awakening that their values are not ours. Alphabetic writing did not begin as a way to
record speech but as a way to count sheep.
No texting, no visiting, no reminiscing or confessing. One could easily run out of time before
making amends.

8

Here’s your heartbeat which you know pretty intimately and there’s history which you don’t
immediately get.
Beautiful summer day, I don’t know what to do about it. Whistle with it,
the corn ripe and the rye with it, deal with it, take many squirrel turbines and spider spans down
with it. Forget about it.
Talk about it. Laugh about it. Nothing I can do about it. Get depressed about it.
Difficult to write a poem about it. Jack just had a big fight with his son Zach about it.
Take your best guess about it. Tell your sons and brothers about it so they can make informed
decisions going forward about it.
God already knows all about it. There’s nothing me and Meredith can do about it.
No one does anything about it although I complain like a blue jay about it.

9

Verbose, with a singing voice, planting tomatoes, finding skulls.
Start each poem with a weather report, an economic analysis or political opinion.
The straight way lost, enlightened levity, patient confusion
that’s who I want to be. Not a YouTube personality. To be. To be touched.
To fly smack into the mountain and never come out the other side.
Accept and repeat. Is this what’s meant by zen or zero. To be at peace with imperfection and
partial achievement, error and evil.
I don’t have a working definition of love. There is no limbo either.
To be a chickadee, a filament of energy, without any machinery.

10

Money in, money out. Information in, opinions out.
Fetal muscles metastasizing, population decline could be a pert good thing.
The species instinctively adjusting to habitat limitations.
You get a limited number of long walks so take your time.
To know the question is almost certainly to find an answer.
A family of broad-winged hawks have settled in our trees.
Vocalizations annoying as phoebes. Interminable hunting and feeding.
Inscrutable purposes incomprehensible and wonderful as teenage girls holding grudges.

11

Sweet summer day although walking the mountain I heard an unidentifiable
background buzz or machine noise so slight I wasn’t sure it wasn’t my tinnitus.
I could still hear birds and streams. Maybe I was hearing photons arriving from interstellar space.
Maybe my hearing is that good!
Gardens and wilderness in which to wander, wander the supermarket
like zombies to the oldies played over the aisles, you cannot let
your attention wander for one second, wander without shelter
in the backcountry and walk the heartless city.

12

You can get almost any U.S. resident address but no international addresses,
not even Canada or the Brits. Why is that.
I like what it says about America, privacy is communal property, trust.
The rest hoard privacy like a gold coin, canned beans in an apocalypse, a good shoe in a death
camp.
It’s the environment we worry about, water shortages, windstorms and wildfires,
afraid to walk under buildings from which an air conditioner or furniture could fall.
That it’s usually safe is a testament to how people care for each other
and it could be a good thing not to hang on to every little living thing.

13

Sickening flatulence, allergenic perfumes and the gastrointestinal substrate.
You don’t get to pick the date of your demise, nor the time zone.
Jack’s got this app that identifies any plant or tree just by pointing at it.
It even got jumpseed, a buckwheat you don’t see much of.
Point it at a tree trunk and it can distinguish gray from white birch.
But it cannot tell the dead apart—rampikes, nurse logs and stumps, whole stands uprooted in
hundred year storms.
Nor you in disguise, a facsimile or factotum, ghost or stand-in, an actress or actor reciting lines.
The blackbird is God but an ironical god. Tropical popsicle, upper Manhattan medical group,
magical only for an hour. Nemesis, twice.

14

Nothing again. I used to laugh at friends
who wanted to make a difference, change the world. Into what
I said. Anything you did or thought, whatever harm or good you’d do
has unpredictable effects. Yet you must act on environment and it must act on you.
Life is a back and forth game
and the work days march forward toward the horrible or pleasurable, wave functions or orbitals.
I am having an existential late life crisis. That is, if it mattered it would be a crisis.
I must continue with or without good humor. Wry humor. Dry humor.

15

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Homer’s Odyssey are an obvious double feature.
I’m sick of having just two parties to vote for.
What about Apiaceae. Umbelliferous inflorescence, grooved stem, small white 5-part flowers.
At least three species are poisonous, e.g. water hemlock. Although the stem of wild carrot is
edible as celery, I’ll never take the chance.
It’s been an ok summer, not too hot, not too wet. A little dry in fact.
Looks to me like plants are thriving, dogwood, yahoo, blueberry, even our one sun-tortured rose.
There are hawks in the maples, squirrels in their foxholes
and Americans not wanting to get shot. Shwartz says we have more in common than that crazy
nazi of a president would have us believe.