A neighbor mows away half his small meadow, and crickets return to unstitch the morning quiet’s seams.

Poison ivy oozes out from sumac shadow. Multiflora rose drips over silver guardrails. Haze creeps down from the north, ours and not ours. 

Stormless, sun-welted, day drives us indoors. 

Our heads ache. We shut the windows. What use are peonies and fraying poppies?  

A rabbit eats white clover as if the neighborhood hawks have taken to their beds with fever. 

To save a rhododendron, cut it back two years ago. Burn the spotted leaves. 

Behind a cavalcade of robins, a phoebe founders in the grass.

There’s a tactile quality in the croaking of the gray tree frogs in the rain, something curved that asks for my fingers to curl around it, makes me aware of every knucklebone.

[Interlude: what goes on unwitnessed.]

Returning, we find the brick walk purpled by clematis, the leaves of the dock and the beans and the strawberry and the turtlehead beetle-bitten, and beetles big as thumbs dead in the mailbox. 

The fields burst green, though chipmunks have eaten all my works.

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Author’s Note: I want to love the whole summer. I think I used to, before I knew enough to worry. So lately I’ve been trying to love summer again, one fragment at a time. Writing this series of monthly field notes poems has helped; I’m learning names for plants and creatures, allowing myself to linger over views and sounds. I drafted this poem—nineteenth, I believe, in the series—in June 2023, noting down images and noises encountered in neighborhood walks or short drives around this area of central Massachusetts, then revising and shaping the poem once the month ran out.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry), and three chapbooks. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Massachusetts. Visit carolynoliver.net for more.