Ode to Summer Lovin

Alright, so I've been talking reverently about the snow and cold, the insane skies, the silenced landscape. Well, today I was cold. I'm not sure why, but it started in the toes during a cloudy sunrise at 0 degrees. I had the chill-inspired turettes, making loud, gutteral sounds to vibrate inside my chest, and then actually beating my breast with my open hands. It all helped a little but my toes remained icy. So, after posting the pictures of today's sunrise, one toward the fiery east, one toward the big moon still hanging in the sky to prehistorically somber west, I'm going to post another picture, taken on the summer solstice, of two of my friends, part of the family, getting married by a tall preacher under a towering, priapic cottonwood, in front a cool, lazy creek, at the bottom of a grassy hill after weeks of afternoon monsoons, and recite the little write that they (and Widespread Panic)inspired. It was written the next weekend at my kitchen table in my previous house on San Antonio St.

So, pictures please:





And, now, summer (ah, my toes are warming up):




Imagine there are 100 people dressed to the nines, summer style, beginning 10 feet from that microphone stand.

At my house alone surrounded by smiling faces over bodies in motion to music blasting from strips of dark, undulating speakers 50 feet tall and 200 feet away. And more smiling faces in tall grass under giant, stout cottonwood trees surrounded by a deep set, slow creek snaking and slurking - people in suits and hot pink dresses, asses slightly bubbled in happiness, reverence and just enough cockiness at the beauty being reflected back. And a tall dark preacher towers under the tree that grew up without a branch for 60 years. And he sings a rumbling love-aby for the couple exchanging vows steps from the creek in front of a family of muscled humans who look at them in silence and, occasionally, in the intimate heat and insect hum, look at each other with shy smiles knowing each is together with the one they look at, blurring lines, riding the little pinprick waves, forgetting themselves in the preacher's low crackle and secretly waiting to lie naked in the creek.