No Smoke, No Heat, No Rain
Porcupine quills of the silver pine
needle the rainbow scroll
of dusk, late July: an eyelid dusted
bluepinkwhite over the vague Cascades—
distant fires... Car alarm and harmonica
of Lake City Way, Rocky barking
and the neighbors watering their plum trees.
How many more summers like this,
what we used to call summer?
To breathe the air and sit in sleeves
hearing seeing smelling
night come on. My husband always
goes in earlier—getting eaten up—
as I linger, spared for now, nursing
that fir in the distance, each bough shifting
like a cat’s tail at sea — even more at the top
where one stout trunk becomes two.
Birds knit the last light with nest talk
then silence before the traffic picks up
and someone whistles invisibly.
Deirdre Lockwood’s debut collection, An Introduction to Error, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in September 2025. Read more.