23. Cover of Dancing at Lake Montebello, after Maril

6×9″ Watercolor

Price NFS

After Herman Maril’s “I Return to the Hot, Humid City”

Heavy air stalls over the harbor.

I’m back from the seashore too soon.

On East Fayette, bodies on front stoops

hardly move, unable to do more

than lift glasses of water to their lips.

Someone’s brought out a portable radio,

a maroon plastic box, set it on the sidewalk.

There are debates between neighbors,

between adults and teenagers regarding which station,

R&B or the ballgame, is more suitable.

I walk to the corner store for a pack of smokes.

The humidity presses down on me.

It will be like this tonight and tomorrow

and the next day. “It ain’t the heat, man,”

I hear the fellow in front of me in line muse.

“It’s the damn humidity”—a refrain across the town.

I‘ve miscalculated, returned in the dog days

when I should be sitting on a wraparound porch,

looking out at the Atlantic, sweet ocean breeze

on my arms, good sleeping weather.

From my window: buildings tinted orange

by the sun’s last heat-blasts,

the Shot Tower a sentry over the baking town.

Lynne Viti

Note: Herman Maril (1908- 1986), American Regionalist painter who worked primarily in Baltimore and Provincetown.