Attitude, last day of August

for Yehuda Amichai

We start to see summer like a tree we are driving by
As we turn from one street to another: a name changes

But what we are doing is the same. The blue spruce
On the corner flips the finger to the season:

It’s all digits and no fists, even its million middle fingers
Are made of more spiky blue fuck-all-of-its.

On the sidewalk the day feels strange,
It’s a day of everyone turning as if they were just stung

By something so small it couldn’t be swatted.
And the hurt look hiding the fear the nest is near.

Every morning the street wakes up and forgets
Everyone who has run over it before but if you walk here at night

You can hear the moans of everyone who could not turn back
Or forgot they ever came this way and don’t know

How they got here, honestly, and that sincerity is what
Seals them into the street’s surface. Regret is parked

On a side street, the windshield reflecting Mars, the gas station
“open” sign, streetlights on passing clouds.

It feels good to walk past all this and know no one
Is waiting at the edge of the dark street that is this line

And my pulse will roar on like so many late night
Truckers on I-81 squinting through exhaustion.