Dog Star.

Dog star, you howl at the moon and not an evening too soon, for your master forgot to give you the cheese from the fridge promised you each Sunday night at nine oh clock. It is the night he plays poker in steamy bars in August. The night he smokes cigars and tips too much to high school burnouts for watered down drinks.

Make it summer again. Take the cirrus and shambles away to the time when little brother swang with me in the hammock at pink salmon dusk streaked with highlights of eighties eyeshadow blue. The sky sang.

Little Brother picked a clean, clear bowl of ruddy warm raspberries that mirrored the sky. The brown-green rows of berry bushes had multiplied with the years, growing like weeds, their tiny pricks giving him a gathering incentive. Calling out behind the whirs of the SunBird, I heard my name shouted. Come and sit with me, it called. Come outside.

Arms guarding from the flies and mosquites, we sat and listened to the end of the day. At first, no breeze, but with time, one spoke softly to us, bringing poems I had planted in the hollow oak tree.
Dying. Well, almost. The sound of the world would wake again in the morning as it had done the day before; now it was tired.

The patio voices dimmed. The older gentleman who lived behind us puttered on his porch. He pretended not to look over the dwarfed wooden fence and through the screen door. A poodle could jump over that fence. His eyes were bird-like and used, milky white like his hair and the milkman. He is all human, all man woman and child, putting on a hard worn cap and going inside to listen to the radio. Prairie Home Companion, probably. Everybody loves the gravelly sound of Garrison Keillor once they hear it. Although we have never met I am sure we would be greatest of friends. His grandmother and mine were best friends when dirt was invented at the beginning of time. I have a photo album of them playing in a wading pool, one summer just like this.

A rusting green truck grumbles in neutral outside waiting for a young girl in a summer sundress to meet her date in the driveway, as she brushes humidity out of her hair.