Summer Afternoon by Mike Dillon
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
— Henry James
A hot wind flays the cottonwood
to a leaf-shadow school of trout
swaying one way then the other
in the dry river bed.
A buzzard’s shadow crosses
the meander of stones left
on their own. Surely, out of all these,
one stone knows.
Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent book is a chapbook, “The Return,” from Finishing Line Press (April 2021).