Horses Of Summer
Close your eyes and listen to the lazy guitar triplets
and it’s July, you’re rockin’ on the porch with a beer
while the sun floats down behind a neighbor’s magnolia.
Then a red splash in the tangerine sky. Her voice—
pan-fried in Southern Comfort and heartbreak. "Summertime
and the livin’s easy," she sings with a scorching tenderness
that feels like forgiveness for the worst sin you ever committed.
And if you’d been able to think at that moment, maybe
you’d wonder how somebody whose livin’ was sharp edges
and a hard rain, never enough and too much, is riding
the horses of summer like a dove on the wind. You try
to picture her in a field of buttercups, sun on her shoulders.
There’s the round face, the ever-ready smile, but what grabs you
is the winter in her eyes. Yet stoked by the music she could lope
through the dark and out, from the Fillmore to Woodstock.
The music was church, fire, the mountaintop, abiding lover.
Where you lose yourself and find yourself. Life was walls
pushing in and the only way to stay alive was to sing.
Now the band turns up the heat on Gershwin’s bluesy ballad
and you hear someone about to implode—but not now. Slowly,
she wrenches a galaxy from "hush Baby Baby Baby don’t you cry,"
and you’re mesmerized yet uneasy, as if the ground is melting
but you don’t want to run. The guitars shift into a jacked-up
wah wah that flings you back to the acid-tinged sixties
and leaves you tripping behind a wall of sound, and when
the maxed-out woman from Port Arthur sings, "till that mornin’
nothin’s gonna harm you," the quiver of faith and fifty shades
of yearning in her voice break open something in you
and you cling to the line as if it’s the only thing in the world
that can save you.
©Lucy Aron, The Litchfield Review, Summer 2004
