“There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night.”
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Summer Haibun

It is raining. There are mint leaves in this tea, dried on a white-hot June day that contained, it seemed, all the juicy stickiness of an entire summer. We ate strawberries that day, and peaches, cherries, raspberries, gorging ourselves, lips purple, fingers pink, as if the fruits and day would last, like the song,

“Strawberry fields forever…”

forever ago. Now,

there are strawberries in this bowl; pale, out-of-season, sun-starved, summer-sick; there wasn’t enough of it. Now, too early: dark, rain. Now I know why old men freeze pesto in ice trays:

so that “in the cold crust” of a night like this, they could pull out one, just one “green-black cube, soften it with heat, and return to sitting shirtless at the table on the patio, limbs loosened. The buttery warmth, harvested and jarred, and spread on bread in winter,”

like jam. We should have made some. We should have saved some sun, strawberries for later. Some “star showers: so sticky so warm so full of light…”

Now, the showers are icy, inky blues, anthracites. And at this table, hunched, powerless: tea, strawberries, poems.

oh, storm made of fire and basil,
of lamps and beds askew
and you, mountain, gulping water and air—

Mountains only “gulp” in poems. Only humans make poems, and art, jam, pesto, for dark, rainy November nights. Only humans despair. Of all creatures in nature. Trees, in storms, stand still. An animal with a paw caught in a trap closes in, “to a kind of still, intense waiting,” just “trying to survive. Is this a key?

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees.”

“Sit it out. Let it all pass.” The storm will, whatever it batters. And the darkness will be gone by morning, if you let it. Meanwhile, add some more mint leaves to more boiling water. Inhale warmth, enough to look up and see early summer. June. Strawberries. Have one, pale, sad as it is; you are too, just trying to last, not necessarily forever…

Turn another light on. Someone outside, in the rain, will be grateful.