midsummer, setting grass alight with a magnifying glass. counting the rings left on kitchen tables from overflowing mugs; my friend tells me that they look like the pale marks on her mother's finger that used to shine gold, and I know that when waters break it means new life, and when you sit in the living room on Sunday mornings it always smells of grapes fermenting on the rims of glasses, and I know I love you - good god I do know that - but I notice all these things are round; the magnifying glass, the ring stains, the pale marks, water droplets, glasses of rotting fruit; these things are round and I am not, and every summer we can burn another piece of the garden, and we'll feed the neighbours at parish funerals as long as the kettle cord kisses the wall sockets, and the lack of colour on her mother's left hand will only stay as long as she remains out of the sun. water condenses, precipitates and returns to the sky to fall on skins of the neighbourhood kids, and you're guaranteed on a dead grapevine each Sunday morning; but I am not round, I am far from it, and I worry because neither you nor I can help our lack of round, even though maybe the pad of your thumb is oval; but we are not round, we don't meet simultaneously. we don't meet at all. I will say this once; the swans in the marina have necks that connect and join two semicircles, and I see birds build round nests, and dogs run in circles to chase their own tails, oh, their innocent, self-centered minds; but we are none of those, we are not round, nor will we ever be; I will watch the oval of the pad of your thumb meet someone else's, and while it may never form a perfect circle, I always believed that our necks may align almost symmetrically. I'll leave you to it, though. I'll leave you to feed into magnifying glasses and I'll leave you to burn other people's backyards in small, circular holes, but I'll still be waiting here, sitting on the top of my dad's car, rectangular, but it'll do. if you're up for it.
