Mid-July Peaches

Portland, Oregon

Summer heats up
AC yanks down windows
on neighbors’ cocktail hour
   spats and TV gunshots
the fourth’s charred paper, wire fuses, and glitter
   litter bone-dry streets
pirate boats eavesdrop
on the riverfront blues festival

crow alarm at 5 am
used to be 4:30
daylight’s shrinking
like cotton on a laundry line

people who hated rain
whine about brown lawns
storm center radio, between songs
of who did who wrong, predicts
         high-90s for ten days
hard to make news
out of consistent summer
killer heat waves, range fires,
and drought strangling this West
though someone may be climbing Mt. Hood,
last window of opportunity melting in alpenglow

Smog silver-hazes the horizon.
Thick day ends in a peach sunset
so wide you might sail away
on peach juice, an inversion’s gift
of bloodstone silhouettes,
from the river’s edge, high-rise
teeth of buildings and banks
shadowed in dense inner-city jams.