For Michael and Ruth

All day, the colorless heat
of too much summer:
parcels of darkness
harboring under the trees,
but nothing green, no blue,
no trace of gold.
It’s only when evening arrives
that we go outdoors:
it hadn’t existed till then; it was only
a notion, like the garden in a Chinese
woodcut, fog and leaves
and dark, late-summer blossoms by a rock
the artist left unprinted
in the paper.
We sit on the deck you have built
for summers like this:
the wine in my glass, the playing fields over the fence,
the flower baskets all around our feet
become too absolute, too like themselves,
a hyperrealist’s parody
of matter.