2 a. m. ,Throat of Summer

A mid-summer night dream

A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.

—Tomas Transtromer

Back in the city we took a taxi to the pool beside the lake beside the highway out of town high summer late at night thick and hot and green smelling that night we were young and drunk all half in love we climbed the high chainlink fence and jumped into the pool in our all our cloths laughing giddy slashing the water almost sizzling on our skin and then cooling in the wind coming off the lake. Happy.

A couple of years before that and I was living in Montreal and I remember we used to go to the abandoned church after the bars closed still excited for the night and too alive to go up the black metal spiral fire escapes and back to our hot apartments where everyone shared one fan. The church had burned down a decade before set on fire by the suicide attempt of the trans organist who would live but go to jail for the accidental death of two firefighters. It took them almost twenty years to do anything with the church property and it was easy to sneak in, all overgrown with weeds and grasses and some big rocks to sit on like benches the fire leaving the frames of the stained glass window and the limestone walls mostly intact but the roof missing and it was a church. Whole galaxies up there in the blue-black. And if I had some of the little lump of spicy moroccan hash I bought from Dave the guy I worked at the lab then we would crumble it over some tobacco and roll a cigarette and the cardboard of the paper as a filter sharing the slow burning together smelling like cedar chips and mud and cloves and something sticky like burnt brown sugar smoke hanging there in the thick air.

I remember the salt crust white on my neck and forehead and jaw after a day of playing tennis my friend Jung (Cook) Moon had a new car he got from his mum’s pyramid scheme that he joined and he was the best tennis player on our team and we would just drive and drive across the desert listening to Depeche Mode. I was in Arizona then trying to be a normal teenager.

I remember the sound of the big fan in the window of the middle room at my grandparents house in high summer. Thick, thick heat. We are surrounded by cornfields, milkweed, alfalfa, the gravel pit, the silver propane tank so hot that you could not climb on top of it, and nearby the tap where if you unhooked the hose you could fill a water balloon. Warm and full and droopy ready to burst. A single breast. The whole whole yard smells of heat. Tomato caterpillars fattening on the underside of the leaves and they smell like the tomatoes they are feeding on when you squash them. They paid us for that. We killed gophers there too the burnt out grass their holes covered over the hose sunk into the hole I was there with the shovel their eyes purple bulging. One time a whole family. We did it for money. I still feel sick. Something broke when my brother saw me do that. And in myself. The corn was growing straight. Grandma and Grandpa cut the ears off the cob would boil it up, would fill a freezer bag and pack it flat and yellow and fresh into the big freezer in the back room. At night they would play cards go into the fridge and put a spoonfull of frozen orange juice into a big glass of pure clear vodka. You could hear the clink from upstairs. They loved each other. They loved to gossip. They made alcoholics of their children. They grew horseradish but just for Grandpa. Grandma hid a pack of cigarettes by the old typewriter in the little room by the bathroom that she never smoked. She had pictures from when she was a model. We used too much toilet paper and this made us feel guilty though not understanding what a septic tank was. Sometimes the whole property felt like it was baking. The asparagus going dry at the top by the garden that had the peppers and near the horseraddish which only Grandpa liked. The carport was cool it smelled like lawnmower gas leaked onto gravel. Grandpa Lake was a racist but we did not understand what that meant yet. My grandparents favoured the oldest boys called them geniuses. I can still smell the hot weeds and fresh cut grass and the front garden and the big American flag on its pole not moving. We would set out and crossed over the ditch like hobbits where the milkweed grew and sometimes find a monarch butter caterpillar on the underside of the leaves near the stem and take the hot gravel track up towards the gravel pit and if you veer off to the side you could almost get lost in the rows of corn. Or wanted to get lost. I can smell the purple flowers what were they? vetch? The gravel pit was like a archeological dig. Hidden in the middle of the fields. Strange muddy canyon grey putty coloured rocks and down and down to the green mud pool at the bottom surrounded by saplings and treelike weeds. If it got hot enough all the water would all dry up and crack some giant puddle. We were down below the world that everyone else knew. We were alone. The four of us.