Orange and egg-long, the high season
moon, like an odd man's head,
is offset. Banked there, distended,
it is some holy, half-risen bread

or fruit or squash. (Butternut's up.)
A cache of insects leaks a balmy hum.
The air is big with it, warm all over.
Distant village lights engorge, handsome

from our hill vantage off the back porch.
The bowl of sour, fat black olives
tempts me: brine-softened skin's
poor covering. In my mouth, the flesh gives.

Air slouches close, corpulent.
It is thickening with the soft stink of grasses
gone over-long, moist soil, and the sweet-leaf
fragrance of grapevines steeping in windless stasis.

We are perched at the head of a falling body
of hills that slope to the coast: regions pulled
large by shadow, curving out and in like belly skin.
As tiger lilies with their long eyes watch, lids hulled,

bean and sunflower stalks rise, full
of the ground's wet effluence at high night.
All around us shadows dilate and enter
the lamp's flaccid half-light.

Faithful, every quarter-hour,
a ripely tinny church bell
rolls over me, then slips into
the hedge roots where it seems to lodge and swell.