Just what you wanted, a weather report.
After my laps, I did some kicking on my back. As I had on my sunglasses, I had the leisure and vision to watch two birds playing high in the sky. I have no idea what kind they might have been, but they enjoyed dancing together and then soaring off by themselves. The sky was clear blue, with only these small, to-my-eyes black birds taking sweet advantage of the day.
I was going to write that the heat today felt like the hot iron that is just this side of burning the fabric you are working on. And then I recalled the word "scorching"; that's how it felt and smelled. No metaphors needed.
It is still 80 but it certainly feels hotter.
The folks at the Senior Center enjoyed the watermelon, which was uncommonly good in my opinion. I have two yellow watermelons in the yard, but I don't know that they are ripe yet. I am pleased that there is another yellow squash of harvesting quality and still another butternut squash on the make.
ALL THE FRUIT IS RIPE
All the fruit is ripe, plunged in fire, cooked,
And they have passed their test on earth, and one law is this:
That everything curls inward, like snakes,
Prophetic, dreaming on
The hills of heaven. And many things
Have to stay on the shoulder like a load
Of failure. However the roads
Are evil. For the handcuffed elements,
Like horses, are going off to the side,
And the old
Laws of the earth And a longing
For disintegration constantly comes. Many things however
Have to stay on the shoulders. Constancy is essential.
Forwards, however, or backwards we will
Not look. Let us swing
As in a rocking boat on the sea.
— Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderin, translated from the German by Robert Bly, lifted from World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Katherine Washburn and John S. Major
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