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• Mailbox Sestina
• So, here’s the edge of summer’s moment, cutting deep
• Into protracted memories like sharpened blades of grass
• You’d again taken for granted, cow-spittle-glazed,
• And cutting open the crickets’ measured elegy—
• Their legworks’ liquid notes evaporate all sound
• As land’s early greening cancels its stamp with tilled brown.

• April rain’s watermark soils with just such a rich brown
• The commemoratives of spring: distant, distinct, deep
• In mind, what mind would pack up in excelsior grass,
• As fragile as ceramic, yet hard and glazed
• As the coulter writing the farmer’s daily elegy.
• (His tractor’s buzzing growl plows through afternoon’s sound

• To perforate its borders.) All totaled, summers sound
• The sigh of sunlit bolts tossed into barn-shadow’s brown.
• Between the light and dark, a country road runs deep
• Beyond the quilted blanket-thought that flesh is grass.
• The practiced route of hours leaves your dusty eyes tear-glazed.
• Your tires eat away at gravel’s hard elegy

• Like a sewing machine’s chattering elegy
• Appalled at its own sound. Time posts summer’s ripe sound
• Until in autumn’s dead-lettered land of grey and brown
• It drags the apple bough down, down… and pierces deep
• The childhood that furs its small feet with shredded chits of grass
• And waits for autumn by a rural mailbox glazed

• With morning hours. For here’s a friendly farewell glazed
• With the come-and-go of solstitial elegy.
• As crickets compose life’s counterintuitive sound—
• Even so, your mind addresses in a study of brown
• The events of June, July, August…. Remember: deep
• As sleep was, new as birth is, lasting as the grass

• Will be, so you go. The sad scent of mown grass,
• Envelops you as you roll the window down, dew-glazed
• As your eyes are shaped to fit the slot of an elegy
• To yesterday. The darkness delivers its sound
• In letters, spurs, flats and sharps—the unlatched dawn is brown
• And yawns with reminiscent light to hint from its deep

• Box the correspondence of time—postscripts in the grass—
• Reversed, glazed with memory’s gum, an elegy
• Delivered without a sound—weighed, stamped, wrapped in brown.

Joseph O'Brien

Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.