The Summer I Was Pretty, and: Dog Days

Abstract

The Summer I Was Pretty, and: Dog Days Rebecca Hazelton (bio) The Summer I Was Pretty The summer I was pretty I didn't have todo a thing. Every man had a poem in his pocketfor me. One man even said I would be the death of him.No one had ever said that about me before.The summer I was pretty the heatwas immense. The public swimming pool was a massof angry bodies. No one was happy. I flew to NYC,I flew to Chicago, everywhere the same, my bed,the sheets I couldn't bear to clean.The man who said I'd be his death didn't die.He stood outside my window and watched me.It did not feel as romantic as I thought it would.I had to remain very still and classical while writingan elegy to my small allotment of beauty—what we both knew wouldn't last. [End Page 54] Dog Days And then the chorus rises, cicadas tuning upas the sun ticks down, their tin voices chantingthe moral of the story before the storyends, how there might seem to be escape but there's only the field on the edge of a woodwhen the shadowed stag steps from the trees, there's only the two women so stunnedby his arrival that they pausefrom sex to watch him watch them with one hoof raised, considering. And if at first they feel wonder, it's fear that next slides alongside the muscled bulk of him, the antlers promising violence wrapped in ripped velvet. It doesn't last—this fever heat stillness.One woman shifts her weight and he's gone.But the sound of a god's exitremains, a ringing carried by the fine hairs in their ears. Though the women return to themselves, they can't return to each other. The rhythm is lost, the grass sharp under their knees.There's not enough light anymore to see but there's enoughto thread this moment alongside other disappointments and so history resumes, and with it the old complaints.This was a real thing [End Page 55] that happened, and thenhappened again. I want to return to when she pinned my ears with her thighs and I listened.I remember her breastwarm in my hand, how I'd felt her heartbeat leaping— it leapt for the stag. [End Page 56] Rebecca Hazelton Rebecca Hazelton is the author of Gloss, Vow, and Fair Copy. She has been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press