Le Sancerre: September

September morning schemes of the possible:
the open sky, the late japonica, the blue day.
Noon approaches on the interplay
of what's imagined, what's forgotten, will
stay in the focus of a gaze that's still
fixed forward. There's an afterwards, to say
the rest, to mingle meanings. Let me stay
where I am, on the arc, in the break of the interval.
It rained enough through August that the trees
in the square touch a green cusp of clarity;
there's still tousled lavender near the duck-pond.
The stout proprietor of the café
puts tables out for lunch on the bare ground
- the beach beneath the torn-up paving-stones.

The beach beneath the torn-up paving-stones
presents itself as facile metaphor:
...