Stroke

Cicadas are making the orchard buzz. A few nights hence they will be closer, then closer still. Once they arrive outside my window their high-pitched screech will induce my late-summer madness. It is a sound that disarrays the molecules of the brain and makes the blood shiver. It's a wonder that mass suicides don't result from this annual infestation. I survive it only by masking the noise with other sounds. If I sleep at all those nights it is only with the television on, until morning silences the insect horde. Then it gets too hot to sleep soundly and I dream of screeching cicadas. Somebody should do something about August.

Sunday Verse

The Arms of Summer

by Octavio Paz

Hear the throbbing of space
it is the steps of a season in heat
across the embers of the year

Murmer of wings and rattles
the far-off drumbeats of the storm
the crackling and panting of the earth
under its cape of roots and bugs

Thirst wakes and builds
great cages of glass
where your nakedness is water in chains
water that sings and breaks loose from its chains

Armed with the arms of summer
you come into my room come into my mind
and untie the river of language
look at yourself in these hurried words

Bit by bit the day burns out
over the erasing landscape
your shadow is a land of birds
the sun scatters with a wave

–translated by Eliot Weinberger

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