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.