Swing

 

Pepper Luboff

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Next door, Oskar’s swinging again

in between watching TV

shows I see through

our window while cooking.

It’s seasonal.

Didn’t see him swing

our one winter here

which makes sense since

it could get so cold outside

boiling water tossed up

would freeze midair.

He swings after a long winter

this late-coming spring

that’s more a precipitous summer

a string of record-breaking highs

and excessive heat warnings

(whose inurement through

news repetition

bodily panic overrides

in three-digit humid heat

when sweat can’t cool

and the hypothalamus melts).

I know he’s swinging

because I hear the swing chains clicking

and get a glimpse of his shadow

stroking the greenery so suddenly

come up after the melt—

his pendular shade

a sneeze tingling across skin

or the river-reflection ghost

fluctuating, hovering

under a bridge’s cement truss

(sun-water-mirror’s whisper of

mississississi mní mní ippi

amplified in cicada stridulation

and the jagged leaf-flutter zhuzh of

the lush riparian collar in

warm wind before a thunderstorm).

I have to lean to get an angle

on the frame to see him.

Even then, I only catch

a waxing-crescent sliver of back

and his clock-bob shadow

cyclically intercalating

with wind-shook shades

of unimpeded weeds

proliferating values of green unfixed

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