Blame It On Summer
that I smile too widely,
grinning really, and laugh
too loud and often; that I walk
with spring and sensual sway;
that I stretch myself and twist
like a cat
baking in the backyard
brightness; that my brain is sun-bleached,
all rule and thought boiled away, leaving
only sensory steam;
that my feverish eyes see strange dancing
flames in afternoon shadows
along the sides of streets and Bedouin oases, fragrant
with dates and goats and acrid desert waters,
in every suburban garden we pass
while you argue and drive
and I stare, heavy-brained with heat
and too aware of my own body
and every other;
that I take a lover,
brazenly, crazily,
too sun-stupid to be careful,
in my dreams.
Notes
Rodriguez captures the intoxicating, heat-soaked surrender of a mind bleached of all rigid rules and societal thought by the blinding midsummer sun. It serves as a beautifully visceral anchor for July, illustrating a radical lightness where all intellectual anxieties dissolve entirely into pure, instinctual sensory steam. By celebrating a state of being so "sun-stupid" that the heavy, guarded ego completely melts away, the poem unburdens the self, inviting us to boldly and unapologetically exist inside the fleeting freedom of our own bodies; that sometimes all of us should. . #poetry #summer #heat #modernist #post-modernist