A new night in spring…

when every spring night feels new,

even as we move toward summer, even when spring is near its end.

The pool glows eerily on spring nights, or maybe it’s just the moon on the verge of being full.

And Blue.

It’s a little too early for a tender song called ‘Nightswimming’ – that comes later, when we’re nearer to September. For now, another R.E.M. beauty – ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which almost matches the tenderness of ‘Nightswimming’.

I’ve found a way to make you
I’ve found a way
A way to make you smile

Spring nights somehow manage to be romantic, no matter if it’s raining or clear, windy or still – and love is always right when the moon and the night conspire to create beauty. It’s there in the warm water, in the perfume of lily-of-the-valley riding on the breeze, in the clouds moving over and behind the moon. The pool is almost like the color of a jade vine bloom dangling in the night of some forest in the Philippines.

I read bad poetry
Into your machine
I save your messages
Just to hear your voice
You always listen carefully
To awkward rhymes
You always say your name
Like I wouldn’t know it’s you
At your most beautiful

Once upon a Boston autumn, I listened to this song right around the time I started dating a sweet boy. We would last for almost two years, and I’d move halfway across the country for him, only to come back heartbroken and alone before we had the chance to share another spring together. We were so young, so hopeful, so unrocked by the world at that point. Still, we weren’t meant to be, and we couldn’t keep it together. He was brave enough to say so; I was brave enough to accept it without a brutal fight. This song brings me back to our beginning – a little slice of happiness and heaven.

I’ve found a way to make you
I’ve found a way
A way to make you smile

I remember sitting on the bed in my Boston place as the sun came in through the bay window. Fall was at hand, but it held on to the warmth of summer, the way cities sometimes hold that season’s heat well into October. Suzie was visiting and we sat on the bed catching up. Nervous to tell her about him, the way I would always be when introducing my boyfriends to her, my giddiness overrode the nerves and I remember smiling like a fool the entire time. The first inklings of love are unmistakable, and so adorably fun; I just wanted to share the feeling, to shout it and declare it and let the whole world know. It was easy to fall in love then, at least for me; my friends were much wiser – safer, too – but I didn’t care. Recklessly, ruinously, ridiculously, I would fall over and over and over again. And it was always worth it – if only for a season or two.

At my most beautiful
I count your eyelashes secretly
With every one, whisper, “I love you”
I let you sleep
I know your closed eye watching me
Listening
I thought I saw a smile

Lately I’ve been looking at long-ago romances and revisioning the hurt I felt at the end of any number of relationships. The endings usually left me sad and bereft, and in sadness there was bitterness. That’s not how I want to remember those love affairs, and so I’m shifting my view of them, choosing instead to remember how wonderful they were in their respective sections of my life. Hence the sweet song of this post, and the revelations – literal and metaphorical – of now and then.

I’ve found a way to make you
I’ve found a way
A way to make you smile

Looking for another place
Somewhere else to be
Looking for another chance
To ride into the sun

Returning from Maine, the road turned from rainy to sunny.

Summer whispered on the scattered days when the temperature reached into the 80’s.

In some cities there is already the bane of a heatwave, driving the warmth into the concrete, into the labyrinthine subway stations, into the headache-inducing unbearable afternoons where the only relief is in a cold shower, in lying very still as a fan does its damnedest to no real avail.

Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun

Somewhere, this song was here before. In a melody, in a riddle, in a dreamscape between sleep and wake. That first brush with sun and heat after a cool spring is disorienting. Giddiness and loveliness and a pretty little mess as we adjust to the new intensity in the sky. Sun – my sun – my beautiful sun – shining solely on my way…

Where everything seems so pretty
When you’re lonely and tired of the city
Remember it’s a flower made out of clay

While I’ve often found myself in New York for at least one summer weekend, the only city I find summer somewhat bearable is Boston, where the bedroom offers easy respite from the hottest part of the day, and the nights cool down enough to allow for restless, aimless walking. It’s the only thing to do when summer heat prevents easy sleep. The only thing to do in a city…

To the city
Where everything seems so ugly
When your sitting at home in self pity
Remember you’re just one more person
Who’s living there

The roads lead back to summer.

The journey that started in the spring…

How far will it take us, how hot will it get, and how will we get there from here? Impossible to make out the twists and turns to come, even if the end – the destination – is in the beginning, in those earliest days of spring, when houses of glass and green gave the only glimpses of hope on those nights still so cold.

Summer rises from the other side of the ocean bed, laps at the harbor of Boston, and stretches out across the Atlantic from the docks of New York – connected by salty tears, ocean droplets, the crying of the sky…

It’s hard to live in the city
It’s hard to live in the city
It’s hard to live in the city