Front Porch Evening

The cicadas start up, high and low

at first, like a machine uncertain

of beginning, then at last the drone

which seems its own silence, so steady,

so capable of making evening its own.

All things seem the murmurs

of their substance, the low voice

not even chant, but surely song

and certainly the way summer

some evenings reckons with itself.

The ease of a porch swing

is the only metronome.