SESTINA FOR THE SUMMER OF 2020

Like a drawing by Van Gogh, I stand rigid in the meadow. I wear my white cap. I peel a lemon, and peer at the trees. I wear my white cap though the brim is too rigid for me to bend against the lemon- brightness of the sun. I stand alone, peer into the middle distance like a drawing by Van Gogh of a woman in a meadow.

It is August, and the earth is dry. The meadow crackles with brown grasses capped with seeds. The summer draws to a close. Have we yet let go our rigid sense of what is real? My peers cannot guess. News sours me, like lemon.

When I was young, I wore lemon cologne. I lay in this meadow beside a man—my peerless lover—who wore a Greek fishing cap. But our bones have gone rigid with the years. We have drawn

living water so long. Now we draw water grown bitter, like lemon rind, and brackish, from a rigid bottle. A butterfly wavers over the meadow searching for one plant to cap with one pale egg. I peer

at her with shaded eyes, my only peer now in this tight-drawn season, this heated season, capped with grasses the color of dried lemon peel. Under my feet, the meadow soil is hard, cracked, rigid

with the hard rigidity of this rainless summer, a peerless summer of an anxiety that a meadow cannot know. The trees live on, drawing their life from deeper water. The lemon sun beats and beats on my white cap.