Kellam Ayres: “Summer Evening”
SUMMER EVENING
Outside, under a light tapped by moths,
the young couple returns late from a picnic.
He wants to touch her face but settles for her hair
instead, brushing it from a bare shoulder
after running out of words.
They believe that when they say goodnight
to each other, they really mean goodbye,
but it often looks the same.
She tells herself not to look for his car
after dinner the next night—
not to stand on the porch in her afternoon clothes,
straining for his sound, fixed as the dead tree
she studies from the porch each morning.
When birds rest on its bare limbs,
they slide their wings onto their backs,
repeating this again and again until it’s right.
It seems like something she could learn from,
the way they know just what they need.
A crow appeared on the tree, once,
with a stiff slice of bread in his beak,
starched and white against the black ink
of his body, and he flew from branch
to branch, unsure of what to do next.
She gave this more weight than she
should have, wanting to believe he tried
to protect the thing. To hide it away.
—after the painting by Edward Hopper (1947)
Kellam Ayres‘ debut poetry collection, In the Cathedral of My Undoing, was selected by Gary Soto as the winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpowder Press, 2024). Ayres’ poems have appeared in New England Review, Guernica, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.