Summer Solstice

I slept late before the longest evening,

Tired by heat,

Waiting for rain that did not come,

Red and yellow amoebas scudding across the weather radar,

Shattering to pixels at the cross-hairs 27510.

All morning I thought about the theologians,

Strange men of the English Civil War,

Who called the world the “economy of nature.”

Henry More wrote that if flashes at night were not ghosts or fairies,

There could be no gods or kings.

The atheists would have won.

Democracy, the rule of beasts, would follow.

His “mutual subserviency,” what nature taught,

Is now the flashing global market, nowhere and everywhere,

And the town commons across the street,

Where we trade sweaty dollar bills for carrots

And halfway exemption.

Unfearful symmetries that we can measure:

The world in the balance again.

Solstice afternoon comes down sweltering, waiting for thunder

And the indifferent fireflies

Pulsing like an unmoored second-hand.