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LAURA DONNELLY JULY AND JOHN CLARE July is lemon balm and rose campion, a hummingbird that drains the feeder each week. Two hummers, swooping to compete for sugar water, cloudy in the sun. I let go of boxes in storage since childhood: puzzles, games, a pink and white house filled with My Little Ponies. I hadn't thought of them in decades but have to fight the urge to keep. I watch the robins. I bet on here. Like John Clare, I walk for miles in the buggy humidity and greet the familiar by name: wood thrush haunting the lower trails with their minor intervals. Is it only us humans that ascribe shadow to a sound? Or maybe each animal holds its own scale. Even so. As Clare knew: Where the troubled dwell, / Thy witching charms wean them of half their cares. I think Clare's thrush wasn't a wood thrush. His is too bright, though Clare went otherwise, separated from the glen he loved. For years, I thought I'd go his way. But the month is a green month, despite all the letting go, lusciously ragged around the edges from the caterpillars and beetles, the rabbit and deer, the luna moth that emerges after the heat of day is done. |