Featured Poem: “October Heat Wave, Remembering August”

A different kind of time— the movement of things, soapy water

descending her body the way a river pulls soil from its banks.

All morning, the electric man clears laurel branches

from the high-tension wires. Oil of bay leaf in her mouth.

Dog days, she skirts the San Anselmo storefronts,

hoarding their slivers of noon shade.

She asks her husband if he knows— do deer speak? Next night

a lost fawn bleats and bleats, throat like an old bedspring.

Window cracked for air. In the old language, the sound of her coming

like the cry of a trapped gazelle. In any language.

-Robin Jacobson

Published in the 1999 Alligator Juniper Issue on the theme Nature & Psyche

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