Ready for it now

“Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.’’

— From “The Long Heat Wave,’’ by Jeff Friedman, a poet and professor based in West Lebanon, N.H.

1889 map