It feels a bit like grief (poem - “Summer’s Wake”)

It feels a bit like grief

The first warnings of fall

The sudden chill in the morning air when until yesterday,

There was nothing but heavy, humid, hot air mugging my every breath

I open the door to the front porch and something like a breeze comes toward me

I may even need a sweater, I think distractedly

The crickets are humming

Where have they been?

Hiding until this moment, this moment where the world signals

It will soon be coming to an end

(A fact forgotten while the days were frittered away)

Something else will begin, something equally wonderful

But what of it?

What we have, what we’ve failed to properly exploit

Is dissolving, vanishing, slipping away

What we’ve failed to properly exploit

That’s the source of the nagging feeling as

I follow the breeze's path across the porch, and across my body

The easy way I settle into the wicker chair

With the front door flung open, then left open

And the sudden desire to live my whole life on the porch

(My refuge, but one that goes on an uncanny hiatus during the summer months)

It’s a thought unfathomable just a few short days ago

It’s been so long

So long since that heavy, humid, hot air’s been molesting me

Not that I truly minded

I’ve learned to love the heat, the few moments ventured each day out of our precious AC

Like some last vital untamed element, savage and unapologetic

I’ve come to consider the heat summer’s blanket, 

Its birth mark

Its guarantee that every submersion in water will be a divine communion

A sign, perhaps, that I’ve assimilated

Into that other country, the South

Atlanta, my adult home

But that’s no consolation now that the chill is there every morning when I open the front door

To search for morning glories and the morning paper

Also of no help: Full knowledge of fall's thrilling rhythms

Not yet anyway

Childhood’s delineation of summer as fun and fall as funeral
Has me weeping silently into the breeze