I hope you are (August)

Gaia has been casually cruel the past four weeks:

this fine Georgian colonial,

skirted with a glacis of friable straw stalks

and dirt

and ants.

Spring green a tattered dream months gone,

it has been life under a fresnel lens just

before the thermal shimmer ignites

I feel like the mis-placed Joad

as, to keep up appearances,

I mow the dust.

Above the two-stroke yammer

I can almost hear each brittle bleached blade snap.

Lumbering sweaty later up the porch steps,

I slap my cap against my hip

And wait for the grit brume to drift.

I sneeze a path through the doors

“Hot!” I choke to the hallway,

Struggling to exhume my filthy socks

from their rank leather tombs.

“Drought!” I sneeze again, limping to the den.

My chore has reduced me to coughing

phlegm-roughened single syllables.

I lean around the jamb, zombie-stiff,

and present my decayed aspect to the room.

The air conditioner hum hazes the quiet.

Poised in their summer zen, chill as sculpture

the children scoff at my coarse state.

A limber teenage knot upon her chair

eyes canted in a superior stare

braces glinting like justice, my daughter

observes: “Eww. You are pretty yucky…”