Aubade at the Summer Solstice, with Language Study and Work Clothes by Anna Phillips Bell

Aubade at the Summer Solstice, with Language Study and Work Clothes
Anna Phillips Bell

Now at midsummer the morning’s still cool.
The year can stay in the bald June light.
Could I stay here, out of the reach
of email, chest wide, day open, lungs
filled now and then with mosquito-sprayed air?
Even with ants in the kitchen? And could you cease
leaving the house each morning, your fine
hair combed, your fine calves
professionalized into slim trousers?
We know better, you are a putterer,
floating outside email also,
mouthing phrases in other tongues,
singing songs you will not call songs—
through-composed and eddying in
their cat sounds down the half-painted hallway,
which is short, so a song travels. Stay,
mutter the words you’re learning,
then say them to me. Well vary the endless
tomato sandwiches with peaches,
with something else, we’ll think of it.
Who asks a person to work in this light?
Who leaves out the door, the little brass bell
disturbed, chittering in their wake?
No. These days are wider than
our faces, than time, than county offices,
stretching us into expanses of summer
from where there is no leaving, where
we breathe together all the ways of breathing.