After our love, I lie in the shadow of your shoulder

also, float to the sound of the seventeen-year locust outside,


their forlorn tenor buzz that ascents and falls together

and all of a sudden it stops, and flares out once more.


Their cadence clears against the sides of the house,

stirs like late leaves, a delicate edgy scratching,


the ave, ave, ave syllables of air, skin against skin.

When we happened to come upon her yesterday, inside the church shadows,


the youthful soloist deserted herself to the words she sang,

her interpretation like a nonattendance of dialect. Her music


cast itself away and away, beating on, until the hush

of a vacant room had its spot, where the heat of day


is just lamplight through the recolored windows.

It channels over the dusty floor. It lights


upon a light blue divider, unpredictable in what it touches.

What's more, the deriding, mating voices of the grasshoppers return once more


in their consistent journey out of the earth,

out of the dull, into the shadows.