How to Capture a Summer

The idea of it is to go forward into the trees
or what at least we can call phrases
and smoke from fire. Two phrases could have burst
and have interconnected, too melancholy, a fountain,
a fierce sense, that the world is summer
and suddenly going to become true. As insects

fall like laughter between our words, insects
the summer soft night is attempting as trees,
as girls in green dresses, and all the candle summer
we wanted a soft light as the phrases
set on the horizon. I fell into a fountain
after you, your blue-black ripples burst

and burst again, winged goldfish flying from the fountain
to the trees to repeat their phrases which reiterated summer.

Author of the article

Rustin Larson's writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). Recent poems have appeared in Oddball, Rootstalk, Poetry East,The Lake, The Galway Review, Pirene's Fountain, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His collection Selected Later Poems is now out with Cyberwit.net. He is on faculty in Maharishi International University's MFA in Creative Writing program. Find more of his work on his website.