I herald dawn

Cleo knows her days, and she'll know as soon as she wakes up that today is Friday. But her grasp of larger calendrical time is still shaky. How many days until my birthday? she regularly asks (and is now increasingly delighted with the answer). And is it summer yet?

That second question is a hard one. Do we hew to the astronomical definitions of seasons? Or do we note that her school is almost out, that Memorial Day is past, and that - well, you can see the picture above. In many senses, it's summer.

The poets can help here, perhaps. For example, Basho, the great Japanese haiku artist, knew the appeal of these soft mornings:

Summer moon -
Clapping hands,
I herald dawn.

Or herald dawn, feed the cat, and stir a cup of coffee, and listen to the music of the songbirds. But the birds are not the only sound of early summer. Think summer, and you have to think of the Beach Boys, as well, with their innocent odes to the pleasures of high summer on the coast. But even their tunes can be shot through with a recognition that summer is never infinite, even in southern California. Think, for instance, of 'All Summer Long':

All summer long you've been with me
I can't see enough of you
All summer long we've both been free
Won't be long until summer time is through

And in this sense, they belong to a much larger poetic tradition. If you flip through the roster of poems beginning with the word 'summer' in The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies, it's hard to avoid being struck by the frequency with which poets comment upon the diminishing of the season. Sure, there are poems about high summer, but reflections on the passage of summer are more common still.

One entry in that list, though, stands out to me, for its combination of celebration and an awareness of the season's fragility. It's by Khaled Mattawa, and it begins like this:

Summer, and a woman lowers her jug to the river.
She bathes and sings the word 'why.'

Yes, Cleo, in my mind it's summer. And so we make our way to the water, and in the midst of the quiet music of the world we take in what we can and perhaps shake our head at the meaning of it all.