Tag Archives: summer

Ice Cream Poem

I saw a melting ice cream cone on the sidewalk while out for my Sunday run today. Luckily, I brought along a pen and a scrap of paper. I jotted down some notes, which became the sweaty, messy first draft of this poem.

Melting Cone

A Drumstick ice cream cone
lying in the middle of the sidewalk
on a blistering July Sunday—
the vanilla ice cream liquified,
while ants scale the surface of
the dented waffle cone.

Did the child cry
when the cone hit the ground?
And did Mom let the girl
run back inside to
grab another from the freezer?
But maybe a kid didn’t drop it—
because in reality,
ice cream misfortune
could befall anyone.

The forecast calls for storms.
Soon heavy rain will scatter the ants
and cleanse the sidewalk,
erasing the evidence of this calamity,
as one more taste of summer fades away.

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Some Poems Celebrating Summer

Stanwix Street

A vanilla ice cream cone
covered with sprinkles of dirt,
a handful tossed by small, grimy hands
across a chain-link fence.
A blond child’s whine—
flat, constant and eerily melodic.
The girl then turning away,
screaming upstairs to her mother,
sound asleep in the mid-August heat,
the lime-green curtains fluttering in the
second-story window of the adjacent brick building.
The child just standing there, scraping off the grit
and licking the melting residue
trickling down her forearm.

Streetlight Paradise

Chalk marks on sidewalks,
fireflies stalking the night,
creaky porch steps,
chain-link nets and
the crack of the bat.

Sour-puss lips break a smile,
then sneak a kiss.
It’s cool to hold hands with
the girl of your dreams,
the one who says she’ll
love you forever.

But forever is too far away.
Our time is now—a passing moment
when our parents look the other way.

Summer fun in the springtime
of our lives, sucking it all in
under this streetlight paradise.

The Mystery of the Wolf

A summer evening in upstate New York—
a backyard sprinkler hisses
while the smell of fresh-cut grass
is pungent and delicious.
Crickets chirp and a coffee-colored mare
snorts from across the barbed-wire fence.

I am alone, kicking a soccer ball,
when a gray wolf emerges from
the high weeds lining the fence.
I try to run, but my legs lock up,
and I tumble to the ground.

The wolf circles me,
then sweeps in on my limp frame.
I can hear its stomach growling
as it hovers over me.
The tongue is extended
and drool splashes my face.
The wolf takes my neck in its mouth,
but does not bite down.

And I wake up in my bed,
thankful that the encounter is just a dream.
I am safe, and no wolf invades my room.
Yet I remain troubled,
afraid of closing my eyes,
drifting back to sleep
and ending up at the mercy
of another predator.

Minors

Toledo in July—a Mud Hens game:
Big league dreamers with names like Bubba, Fausto and Tyler
toil away in the minors,
hustling for the scouts perched behind home plate,
diving for line drives and sliding head first,
with egos in check and mouths full of dirt.

Pillars of artificial light frame the setting sun,
and from beyond the azure sky,
the ghosts of washed-up utility infielders
and middle relief pitchers
pull for these hard luck Triple-A players.
They want to scream, “Take heed, savor it now,
for this is the best you will ever be.”
But they’re under orders to keep their mouths shut,
and can only blow a home run foul every once in a while.

The steel girder stands are filled with a crowd
that still believes in this clockless game.
They listen intently for the crack of the bat,
and sing with all their might during the seventh-inning stretch.

Little kids with hot pink shorts and noisy flip-flops
smear their faces with mustard and hug Muddy the mascot.
They scatter peanut shells and scamper after foul balls,
and for them the score is merely an afterthought.

The summer night comes to a close
with a game-ending double play and a fireworks barrage.
The fans file out and load into their cars,
going back to real life with memories of Mud Hens
now stitched in the seams of their minds.

(All four poems were previously published in Dreaming of Lemon Trees: Selected Poems, Finishing Line Press, 2019).

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Smiles of a Summer Night

I’ve been digging through some old poems and found an unpublished poem inspired by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.

Bergman is a huge inspiration for me, and I’m obsessed with his work. But Smiles is too light for my taste. I prefer the more somber, melancholy Bergman works—The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light.

Nonetheless, I’m glad his summer comedy led to a poem. The verse never found its way into one of my collections because I don’t think it’s worthy of publication. I’m posting it here only because summer is slipping away, and I think it captures the feeling of the season.

Smiles of a Summer Night
(With Apologies to Ingmar Bergman)

Smiles of a summer night
emerge on a human canvas
smeared with cotton candy
and dripping watermelon juice.

Smiles of a summer night
collide in a lovers’ embrace
shielded by corn stalks.

Smiles of a summer night
burst open in collective
“oohs” and “ahs”
elicited by fireworks.

Smiles of a summer night
come caked with dirt after a
head-first slide into home plate.

Smiles of a summer night
are everything that is possible
under the setting sun.

Smiles of a summer night
are fleeting, fleeting, fleeting.
And smiles of summer night
with the onset of September are done.

 

 

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Late August

Today marks one month since my brain surgery. My recovery is going well, but I’m still not back to full strength.

I’ve been walking in my neighborhood to build up my stamina. I’m still using the cane I received when I was discharged from the hospital, but I hope to ditch it soon.

When I walk, I don’t listen to music or podcasts. For safety reasons, I need to hear cars approaching, and I also keep my ears open for stimulating sounds—birds, wind chimes, children playing, etc.

A lot of times, I get ideas for poems while out on my walks. Often, one line will pop into my head and start me down the path of writing a poem. Recently, I was walking and thinking about the end of August, and this line came to me: It’s always sad when summer ends. I jotted the line down in the small notebook I carry with me. After some work, this is the poem I produced:

Late August

It’s always sad when summer ends.
But avoidance of the inevitable is impossible.
And in this season of life, a little winter must come.
So I tell myself to stop being disgruntled
by summer’s death and autumn’s arrival,
and instead get to work—starting with
descending the cellar steps and bringing up
the long johns, flannel shirts, and heavy wool socks.

It’s not the greatest poem in the world. But I like that I followed the trajectory the poem wanted to take—starting with one line, then others scribbled in my notebook, followed by revisions on the computer.

So I recognize the importance of awareness and paying attention to both external and internal stimuli to use as raw material for poetry (and stories, etc.).

And this reminds me of a line from the Grateful Dead song “Scarlet Begonias” (thank you, Robert Hunter):

Once in a while, you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right …

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Summer Reading Inspiration

Digging through some totes in my living room, I found this archival evidence of my early obsession with books.

Library reading certificate, 1976.

During America’s Bicentennial year of 1976, my mother had enrolled me in a summer reading program at Jervis Public Library in my hometown of Rome, New York. The librarian had divided the group into two teams—the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Yankees—and we competed against each other for the most books read over the course of the summer. I can’t remember which side I was on, but the librarian was prescient, because Cincinnati would meet New York in the World Series later that year, with the Reds sweeping the Yankees to win the title.

I wish I had a list of the eighteen books I had read during the summer of ’76, as I would like to revisit some of them now.

As for this summer’s reading list, I am starting off with these selections.

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, a memoir by Frank Bruni.

Frank Bruni book cover.

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems, published by Library of America, and The Closers by Michael Connelly.

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems, published by Library of America.

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Farewell Summer: A Poem

Here’s a short poem I wrote about the shift of seasons, as we transition from late summer to fall.

Wiki photo by Acidburn24m.

Farewell Summer (Apologies to Bradbury)

The death of summer—
sadness reigns
as the season wanes.
No more soft-serve
ice cream cones,
lakeside walks,
baseball games and
backyard cookouts.
Late August
blues ensue,
giving way to the
birth of autumn.
And you know
what comes next.
Mother Nature
pulls Old Man Winter
down from the attic,
sharpens his dentures
and deprives him of food—
until she’s ready
to set him loose
on the world again.

©2018 Francis DiClemente

 

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Kiddie Party Planning

I recently spotted this scrap of legal pad paper on the ground in the parking lot of a medical complex in Liverpool.

Party planning list.

When I picked it up, I read a list of items needed for a kids’ party. Some of things jotted down included: hot dogs, water, sunscreen, juice box, ice cooler and plastic spoons and forks. There was also a reference to yard games, e.g. potato sack races.

On the flip side of the paper were the following notes: “order sheet pizza, order cup cake cake. Emoji. Approx 15 kids. Adults?”

Party planning list (flip side).

I love stumbling upon these little notes because I feel like I get a glimpse into the person making up the list. Also, I know that if I were planning a party for 15 kids, I would do the exact same thing—make up a detailed “To Do” list. I was curious, however, about the absence of a “bouncy house” on the list.

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Blissful Upstate Summer

I spent last week in Rome, New York, as I recovered from Gamma Knife radiation treatment intended to eradicate leftover pituitary tumor cells. And I was once again overcome by the spectacular beauty of summer in my hometown.

Now that we have skipped past the Fourth of July, summer is ripe, bursting open in color, sounds and scents, but soon it will wane. Soon autumn will overtake it.

But now near perfection reigns in central New York with warm days, flowers in full bloom, vegetable gardens producing their bounty and children riding bikes and playing outside. We need rain here so it’s not quite perfect.

As I went for an evening walk heading toward Vogel Park in Rome, sunlight filtered through the lush maple trees lining North George Street, casting a greenish-yellow glow. Along the way I dodged hissing sprinkler streams dancing over burnt lawns and spilling over on the sidewalk. I saw teenage boys playing Frisbee in a front yard. A basketball bounced on a driveway and screen doors smacked against doorjambs. The smells of freshly-cut lawns and grilling meat entered my nose.

I also heard the voices of summer as I walked past the houses.

“Let’s go Randall.”

“All right, I’m coming.”

“Come on Meg, time to eat.”

Summer is such an intense sensual experience words and images alone cannot do it justice. Ray Bradbury came as close as possible with his fictional Green Town.

I think these days of splendor in central New York are God’s way of making amends for all the lake-effect snow days of December, January, February and March when darkness comes at 4 p.m. and the cold air bites your face. But you can’t contain summer. You can’t bottle it up and preserve it like dandelion wine, store it in Mason jars and open it up on a February night when your bones ache and the snow melts inside your boots while you shovel the driveway.

Summer is also a nostalgic time, as we remember our youth spent at the playgrounds and baseball diamonds, doing cartwheels to show off for grandparents, running around the neighborhood with sparklers and chasing the ice cream truck down the street.

I also consider the math when looking at my life. How many more summers do I have left? And then I think only one, right now. That’s it.

While driving with my brother one afternoon last week I spotted a white banner stretching across Black River Boulevard. It announced the Drums Along the Mohawk drum and bugle corps competition would be coming on Aug. 2. “Oh no,” I said to my brother, “that means summer’s ending soon.”

The competition has always been one of the last big events of the summer in Rome, signaling cooler weather, moms checking off their school supply purchase lists and the Rome Free Academy football team practicing in two-a-day sessions. My stepfather also says Drums Along the Mohawk sometimes coincides with bats sneaking into the house and circling the kitchen or family room.

An ice cream truck is parked along Stanwix Street in Rome.

So before summer is gone again, make a point to leave the house, walk around the block and look at the stars, eat your share of ice cream cones, race to finish nine holes of golf in the gloaming, attend a minor league baseball game and go for a night drive in the country to hear the whoosh of the tires against the asphalt.

Summer is indeed fleeting, but we still have half a cup left to enjoy.

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