July by Tyler Meier


 
 
Summer’s biographers: two lilies.

Their orange a document

of the season’s persistence, their necks

a slender new alphabet for everything

I’ve ever loved. Sky the color

of a nervous horse. What the fly does

to the shadow is for the shadow alone,

even though the always-light keeps pressing down

on all of us, even though you memorized

the fly so that you could repeat it later

to the moon. Tonight the mountain

is on fire, and the irony is that it now

resembles hell. Sometimes you have to go down

to the bottom to see

the bottom. Look at how

it recognizes me, old friend, even though

I have spent all this time

believing in my own life.
 
 
Tyler Meier’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in At Length, Boston Review, Bat City Review, jubilat, Indiana Review, Poetry, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He works in Tucson at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.