a week in June

It was summer until it wasn’t. For as long as it was summer, it was sea swims and towels hanging to dry wherever they could, it was the feeling of your skin as it tans and the hot pebbles on the beach burning the soles of your feet, it was the backs of the children’s necks sweating, baby curls damp there at the nape and hardly anyone sleeping so the days became blurred ragged things we wanted more and more of; supper was roasted chicken and things salvaged from the bottom of the fridge, eaten late with elbows on the table and opinions out, windows and doors open, everything for the neighbours to hear, it was barely being able to wait for ice poles to freeze and everyone arguing over the cola flavoured ones, it was cheap Greek wine down the local, drank outside with tomatoes for lunch, it was boys teaching each other guitar and music becoming a language they could learn to tolerate each other with, it was swifts mewing overhead and gulls teaching their babies to fly. For as long as the weather held, there was no punctuation. Maybe someone began to tire of it, maybe a child said too hot, another too tired, maybe another one said I’d like it like this forever, if we could work out a way to never see winter again, maybe I said I’d happily never see another, even if that wasn’t what I meant. We laughed, the door still open but the air pressure thick and heavy, our temples hurting and tempers beginning just to go. I’ll put the kettle on, I said, when what I wanted to say was something about happiness, but it’d been said before in one of the poems I’d sent her all the long winter hardly just gone when I wanted to believe something so flimsy could keep someone alive; I wanted to say something about it coming on suddenly, or the bats being so happy they didn’t know they were happy, or how sometimes it is you suddenly find you want all of it; how when Cocteau was asked what he’d save if his house was burning he said the fire, only the fire and I used to think the same, but as she gets up to put the kettle on the stove, I don’t want the fire, or the happiness coming on suddenly, or the bats even, I just want this: the kitchen table, the tea, the rain about to fall and her hand, reaching for the matches.