Summer

He felt fenced in by the construction din. Summer -- the season of repair. The roads redolent of cracked winter lips, all moisture drained. A new layer of asphalt glues the roads together for now; they'll shrink next winter, splitting again in late spring from the waves of heat that hover close but are unreachable in front of our eyes. Everything holds for awhile. Not much is meant to last. We emerge from the cold dark into a few months of loud preparation for what will eventually come undone. So I stay awake and watch the hours of lingering daylight that don't exist in the winter, and I listen. For awhile, the surgery stops. The streets make space for sound in the summer; the hum of silence does not get stuck in the thick snowbanks. We stay still. There's nowhere to go. We're all a little worn down too. In the day's final hours we think of how to fill the gaps in ourselves.