"Bleecker Street, Summer"

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

It is a summer of songs composed in blood,
tuned with guns and arranged in conversations.
It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes.

Elles sont l’âme de l’été, l’horloge des minutes d’abondance, l’aile diligente des parfums qui s’élancent, le murmure des clartés qui tressaillent, le chant de l’atmosphère qui s’étire et se repose. Et leur vol est le signe visible, la note musicale des petites joies innombrables qui naissent de la chaleur et vivent dans la lumière.
À qui les a connues, à qui les a aimées, un été sans abeilles semble aussi malheureux et aussi imparfait que s’il était sans oiseaux et sans fleurs.

Under the sun the summer grasses fade.
The rose, expiring after the harsh ravage
Of the heat, languishes toward the shade.
Sleep drips from the foliage.

Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.

Summer is here.
Summer, the season I met you, is here.
A summer without you is here.

When summer gathers up her robes of glory,
And, like a dream of beauty, glides away.

Summer-we all have seen-
A few of us-believed-
A few the more aspiring
Unquestionably loves... .

Summertime is important. It's like a shaft of sunlight.
Or a note in music, said Elizabeth Acheson.
Or the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy, said Marilyn Roberts.
Stuart sighed. Never forget your summertimes, my dears, he said.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away.

I never wholly feel that summer is high,
However green the trees, or loud the birds,
However movelessly eye-winking herds
Stand in field ponds, or under large trees lie,
Till I do climb all cultured pastures by,
That hedged by hedgerows studiously fretted trim,
Smile like a lady’s face with lace laced prim,
And on some moor or hill that seeks the sky
Lonely and nakedly,—utterly lie down,
And feel the sunshine throbbing on body and limb,
My drowsy brain in pleasant drunkenness swim,
Each rising thought sink back and dreamily drown,
Smiles creep o’er my face, and smother my lips, and cloy,
Each muscle sink to itself, and separately enjoy.

And Summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended
In her fulness of wealth that might not be amended;
But this is the harvest and the gathering season,
And the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.