Tony Robinson, "Dog Day Sonnet"

1. It is only the rain in August a likely repetition this year makes like the last.

2. A list may be useful: ten things about Oregon or five things only you know about Oregon.

3. Downpour. We have ears & eyes for combat.

4. Fires on the hills behind my house of sticks. Faggots & fascicles spontaneously combust.

5. Approaching it with high expectations. How else can we enter?

6. A boy’s club. A place for gathering. When we fuck the night bunches up at the corners.

7. The electric fan hums & the open windows smell of sixteen gravel pits asphalt.

8. When you cried out I was thinking of a sandwich the blood you left behind.

9. All the old forms have been used up between the “compacts of sluts.”

10. A phrase repeated again accrues symbolic relevance even as it is drained of semantic juice.

11. In the summer’s first real rainstorm the usual gloaming is obscured by clouds with the faces of men.

12. My house contains four Mexican rugs. It contains a woman and a pig.

13. Cloudy in the morning chance of showers animals dying softly on the doorjamb.

14. We only say it in the dark or repeated in many tongues. What can we possibly know?