Issue Eighteen - Summer 2011

High Summer

By Michael Larrain

For Wilder Kathleen

You move through light
like water through a throat
accomplice to every living curve
as though at any moment
you might encounter god
or at least a distant cousin
once removed by marriage
to whatever you last touched
or smelled or tasted
remembered, dreamt, or lost,
Now the peaches are in their adolescence
and the penny jar is filling up
One day is attached to the next
by a spider on the ceiling
The nights grow deeper
the darkness rich
with an untold wealth of daughters
It’s high summer
and we’re all swimming
very slowly
for our lives

Copyright Larrain 2011

Michael Larrain was born in Los Angeles in 1947. He is the author of three collections of poems: The Promises Kept in Sleep, Just One Drink for the Diamond Cutter; and For One Moment There Was No Queen. Day Women Press of Willits, CA, has released a CD of his reading of selected love poems called Lipstick: A Catalogue for Continuous Undressing. His novels are South of The North Star, Movies on the Sails, and As the Case May Be. His children's storybooks are: The Girl With the Loom In Her Room, Heaven & Earth and Homer the Hobo & Ulysses the Goat. He lives in Sonoma County (California) with his wife and four-year-old daughter, Wilder Kathleen the Rage of Paris Larrain, and has long been a senior partner in the Way-Up, Firm And High-Tail It Bright Out of Town Detective Agency, a loosely-aligned confederacy of shady characters devoted to the complete discrediting of reality in our time.

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