It’s June! It’s summer! Or, well, it will be soon…Not yet glorious summer in this neck of the woods. June for the Northwest is blue skies & 80′ with a nice breeze for a maximum of two days in a row, bookended by weeks of regular old gray & 60′ with sprinkles. Layer, shed, layer, shed, layer…

In July, summer is a real season, though even then “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Right now summer is just a feeling, just like “the hour things get / To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet,” as Joshua Clover’s “An Archive of Confessions, A Genealogy of Confessions” goes. Or, as Laurie Sheck puts it in “No Summer as yet,” “No summer as yet, but it will come with its bright pieces of whatever.”

I like Carlo Betocchi’s “Summer” (trans. Geoffrey Brock) too, with its “vain summer,” its “bright green sins” and the trees “still green, but breaking / the heart of the air.” Summer in David Allen Evans’ “Girl Riding a Horse in a Field of Sunflowers” is both bright with color and slight enough to be held by a girl in one hand.

And there’s Dick Allen’s melancholy afterlife-as-summer-house poem “If You Get There Before I Do,” included partly because it mentions Crater Lake, which I think should be on everyone’s list of places to visit. Summer is a particularly nice time to go…