The White Porch
Summer
Time: 1:00 A.M.


Midsummer
A flotilla of stars
Sail out of their blue harbor
Sparkling
Dazzling
Twinkling
A regalia of starlight
Appears over a regatta of silent houses
Massed with maple
They canvas the boulevards
In a wave of green
Hoisted into darkness
Houselights
Flag and flicker
Into a stellar of dancing light
Leaving
Listless leaves
To heave
In the wake of the heat

Slumbered in sleep
Blanketed in dreams
Bathed in moonlight
Protected
In a silent gauze of naked heat
Cocooned
In a bedraggled sheet of salted sweat
Bodies sheer swells of sweat
Onto a sebaceous sheet of silver satin
Basted
With perspiration
Bodies
Simmer in a rotisseries of saturated sleep
Until
A panacea of cooling fragrance
Yawns
Across their balmy bodies
Succumbing them into a sinuous sojourn of somnolence

Outside

A Verdure of panting leaves
Drape the house
Under a parasol of mirroring shadows
Drooping
With droplets of dew
Weeping
For dawns redemption

Below

Under the depth of darkness
Sedulous roots
Search
Scout and seduce the secular soil
For its consecrated water

Above

Steadfast trunks stand tall
With stoic crosses that branch out
From an armory of steel-gray bark
Lanced
With a green shield of foliage
They stave off the fiery dragon
Dragooned
Into a purgatorial pyre of wood
They stand under a beacon of light
Marooned
In a mooring of moonlight
Alone
On a moribund mound of moraine
Parched
On sparing straw
Blades of grass now graze on droplets of dew
As empty trunks fill their viviparous veins
With hope

Darkness sprays
Into a monochromatic white
The nicotine opens the night
With its trumpeting fragrance
A reveille
For Major Hollyhock
And his wilting troop of flowers
Dressed
In a uniform of polished purple
He regimented the garden in a pride of color
Standing erect
He reviews the garden

In his petiole of spiked ruffles
Where he oversees
And protects
Primrose and Sweet William
From the encroaching sun
Shadowing their light
With shades of darkness
He sheds their shadows from the encroaching night

Asleep
In a bed of soil
Cosmos stretch their lacy foliage
Over a bevy of sleeping daisies
While White Carnations button the darkness
With an air of formality

Fanning
In a gentle breeze of scented sweetness
Southern Belle sashays into the shadows
Of a white colonnaded garden shed
Titillating young Larkspur
With her huge hibiscus
Disgusted
With her dissolute display of dalliance
Tanagra Lavatera
Flays her pink saturn petals
In a brisk breeze of distain
Turning away from the sultry hibiscus
She careens towards an aisle of Golden Marigolds

Gliding the sandy pathway
With a circle of platinum
Ringed
In a panoply of white
Baby Breath
Encircles a dappled train of mottled lace
Around them
A velveteen moss
Covers a damp grey slated pathway
And like a velvet antler
It branches off into the moonlit night

Crossing

It ends under an arch of thorns
Where a rood screen hosts a pergola of blood
Berries