August

---

by Daniel Simonds

---

The split-railed fences sinking and sunken: the shiny red arrow of the beach path sign—
pointing to where you took her one midnight in August for a walk to the sea and thereafter
two thousand more evenings searching for the exact moment love happened, before the hedges grew helter-skelter awaiting their late-spring trimming, before your landscaper friend tells you and her, in a wizened voice, “I think I’ll return their shape to a whale,” and she replies,
“Oh! But we still see the shape of the whale,” before you heard a child trilling on a bosun’s whistle— calling ‘Attention’ to the poets, followed by a ‘Sweeper’s call’ for an end to the regular workday, for you to man a broom and clean up with what you’ve found of poetry in life so far, the poetry of readying yourself for another summer of deadened love and attending to anything rattling— such as the ruddy turnstone, which a passing local ornithologist tells you she’s just seen on the beach, describing its behavior as a battle of overturning stones, of digging, probing and routing for crustaceans and gastropods, with the fancy white cravat of its neck
and a coppery, harlequin plumage, and you’re hoping to see one for yourself someday, but first you step inside to look up its binomial name: Arenaria interpres: from the Latin arenarius, or “inhabiting sand,” from arena, meaning “sand,” and interpres, meaning “messenger” and you think of how you’ve been meaning to overturn a million stones that will allow you to craft a message about the arena of sand of which you and her are a small part.

---

---