Summer: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010)

God moves mysterious thunderheads
over the towns and office buildings,
cracks them open like raw eggs.
The north has critical humidity.

The south plucks at its sweaty clothes.
The weatherman says it’s August,
and a sniper is haunting Washington D.C.
He’s picking victims at random from shopping malls and parking lots,
touching them with bullets like blue fingertips,

and some say he’s an unemployed geek with a chip on his shoulder,
and some say he’s an agent of ancient Greek theology.

Gibb says the sniper is a surrealist travel agent booking departures
only
Or he’s a dada lawyer without a client arguing in thirty caliber
sentences.

Robin says the sniper is what the country invented as a symptom of its
mental illness.
Marcia is sad because she knows the sniper could have been cured
by a regimen of vitamins and serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

We had fallen into one of our periodic comas of obesity and celebrity
when the sniper went off like an alarm clock

and the preacher on TV
said that he had come according to Revelations 3:14
to punish us for the crime of not being ready for death—

but as Snoopy the clerk at the 7-11 said,
What kind of crime is that?

Meanwhile the air conditioners are working overtime,
the rooftops are full of SWAT teams and camera crews
and the sky too is mobilizing:
dark clouds without speaking; menacing millennial clouds.

We don’t know yet what the metaphysical facts are;
We don’t know if our sniper is domestic or foreign terror,
what color the chip on his shoulder is
or what we will do if the sniper chooses us tomorrow.

But when we walk out now, we feel our nakedness.
Each step has a slender string attached.
And when we move, we move more quietly,
as we slide between the sinners and the snipers and the summer,
in the simmering medicinal rain.

—Tony Hoagland, “Summer,” Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010)