July - John Updike

[Larry Robinson]

July

Deep pools of shade beneath dense maples,
the dapples as delicious as lemon drops_
textures of childhood, and its many flavors!
The gratefulness of cool, the bottles of
sarsaparilla and iodine-red cream soda
schooled like fish, on their sides,
in the watery ice of the zinc-lined cooler
in the shade of the cherry trees
planted by the town baseball diamond,
where only the grown-ups cared what the score was
and the mailman took his ups with a grunt
that made the crowd in its shirtsleeves laugh.
The sun kindled freckles like a match
touching straw, and beneath a tree
a quality reigned like the sound of a gong,
solemn and sticky and calm. Then the grass
bared the hurry of ants, and each blade
bent to some weight, some faint godly tread
we could not see. The dapples
were not holes in the shade but like pies,
bulging up, and air tasted of water,
and water of metal, and metal of what
would never come_real change, removal
from this island of stagnant summer,
the end of sarsaparilla and its hint
of licorice taste, of sassafras twig,
of things we chewed with the cunning of Indians,
to whom all trees had souls, the maples no more
like birches than clouds are like waterfalls.
The dying grass smelled especially sweet
where sneakers had packed it flat,
or out of the way, in the playground corner,
where the sun had forgot to stop shining.
this was the apogee, July, a month
like the piece of a dome where it flattens
and reflects in a smear high above us,
the ant-children busy and lazy below.

	- John Updike