A Penalty For August

While the ancients sleep drunken dreams in an August haze of torpor, reheated by a relentless sun, when the grills and water torches light up the night with feasts of raucous laughter, the sealed sweat from that riotous time begins floating upward. Fastening onto mariner's winds; coalescing past curious birds; savoring the sterling starlight;hardening into a glass meteor. Indurate invader- that is slapped down with frigid malice by the unappeased agnostics who reject such divinities. Streaking through a dismal, grey cumulus exposed in an antiseptic freezer, it explodes. Shattering it's liquids memories all over; bleaching the tightened barks of trees; stringing silver gossamer threads over tiles and pitch; chattering antennae and chugging chimneys; smearing windshields with Vaseline vapor. While we look out and dread our first tender, numb steps outside, crunching and slipping with the fearful hangover of a punishing Puritan winter.