A woman stands alone in a parched meadow in August, wearing a stiff white cap and peeling a lemon. She compares herself to a figure in a Van Gogh drawing, as if she has become a picture of waiting. The mood is hot, tense and weary. The poem's title points to the summer of 2020, and the speaker's mention of sour news and an "anxiety that a meadow cannot know" suggests a world under strain, though the poem never says exactly why.
Memory cuts through the present. She recalls lying in this same meadow with a lover, young and smelling of lemon cologne. Now bones, bottles and water have all turned hard or bitter. Her only companion is a butterfly searching for a place to lay an egg, a small sign of hope in a cracked landscape. The trees survive by drawing on deeper water, and the speaker seems to wish for that kind of reserve. The repeated words, like "rigid," "lemon" and "cap," make the summer feel inescapable, as relentless as the sun beating down.