Blueberry Days of Summer

Blueberry Days of Summer

(“The Son of Man came to look for and to save people who are lost.” Luke 19:10)

There was nothing stacked against me,
I knew the odds all along. There were no
enemies
out to get me,
I knew that I could belong to another club if
there were.
But the days huffed dryly, the nights wrung the
life out of me. I looked up for rescue, out for a
dollar in the sky. I looked down in the graying light
of morning, wandered the town while the laundry dried
back home.

They laid hands on my head; they told me Christmas
was coming. They hinted it was better ahead but
the past kept me succumbing to production lines;
machines that squeezed gears between the fibers of my soul.

I could pray a minute longer, maybe two, than the last people
to go home. I could sing a little. I could sing. I ate
ice cream cones and
made no eye contact with those who promised atonement.
I was determined to be a casualty of my own indiscretions.

I pulled my weight. I pushed some down the road. I watched
the autumn pull the sun below my point of view. My truth
came in packets like sugar. My hands worked hard and
were bored. I loved and I did not know how. Even now
I’m a beat behind what I had hoped to find in this
cross-country excursion. I would face it like a man (or
that was the plan), but I never got the chance. Once the
incriminating documents were found
I shivered. I hid. I shut down. And hoped I could still
love a little, sing a little, define the movements of dissatisfaction.

There is no happy turn, no resolution that makes it clear. There
is still this muddy journey, there is still the dissertation run over
in the middle of the road. I wanted hills and oceans of dance.
I wanted to finally believe in circumstance. But the evidence piled
up
while I ran circles around myself.

But today (did you hear the pause?) the
blueberry days of summer woke me like a
daydreaming boy who still remembers how
to play. And though my senses, my clarity, my
sincerity depart, I find the rising warmth from lawns of
June to be
the sweetest calculation.