Summer Evening Music

by Daye Phillippo

A breeze sifts the feathery locust leaves
   the way the mind sifts memory, tenderly.

The sun, that old dog, takes its time settling
   behind the train station. On the front steps

the Lafayette Citizens Band is tuning up. Noah
   our sixteen-year-old, will tonight belt out

jazz and Sousa and Mozart, same saxophone
   my father played, same band when I was young.

Lamppost globes wash the evening watercolor.
   Even the train seems to pass, whispering.

Summer evening music as the moon rises
   and children chase, barefoot in grass beneath trees.

Beside me, my pregnant daughter, her unborn son,
   turning in his amniotic sea, must hear

the music, too, watery soundings like whalesong.

Evensong

            to GMH

I saw no kingfisher or “roundy well,”
evening, late summer prayer walk
around the hayfield behind the church,
but heard a killdeer shrill as it swooped
and dove by three crosses on the hill,
white undersides of its wings, and I
saw among the swarming gnats, bright
with setting-sun light, a dragonfly
“catch flame,” and felt the communion
of a like mind, walking with me there.
All over the field, awns of grass flamed,
table of earth, candles lit for evensong.

What Falls Into It

Each morning after dressing,
I lie back on the bed
to put in the eyedrops
the doctor told me to apply
if I hope to keep seeing,
and I watch
as the clear drop
falls from the tiny bottle
into my eye
and think what a vulnerable
thing this is,
to be lying here, eye open
waiting to receive
what falls into it.
They say the fastest speed
a falling raindrop
can hit you
is 18 mph.
Yet what about
all those people in countries
where missiles and debris
and terror
are falling into their eyes
each morning?
How fast do those fall?
Yet here I am, other side
of the same globe,
going about my day—
dressing, dripping in eyedrops,
walking out into the aroma
of damp autumn leaves,
the only sounds falling
into me from the distance,
cattle bawling for breakfast
and from the tangled woods,
the tiny chirps of a wren.

BIO

Daye Phillippo has lived her life backwards, first raising a large family and later earning degrees in creative writing from Purdue University and Warren Wilson MFA for Writers. She taught English at Purdue and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, The Midwest Quarterly, Cider Press Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection. You may find more of her work on her website: www.dayephillippo.com