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Labor Day
by Maura MacNeil

There are windows open and voices carry further than the sound
of words knew it could take them. You sit outside on a hill

because it is a hot evening and the house is small and smells
of grease and summer children, but it is the end of summer

and everything soon will change. The ferns along the rock wall
have withered, the berries picked and eaten. It is certain

that dark will arrive early and tonight windows will
be kept open to free the sound of sleep, or the wrestling of love

that moves about this place. These days these sounds are often so loud
it wakes you and sometimes it is too much to bear. You have been tricked

to believe in a form of silence that is no longer here.
This joke follows you as you rise and move through the yard.

It will eventually turn you back inside that small house,
but for a while you are still and listen and are amazed at how difficult

it is for voices of people you can’t see to be contained.
They move through your body with will and hover until the shift

of light and wind forces a shift of sound and you think about the end
of a season when evenings like this one will be buried in a rustle

of leaf piles, or the rattling of beech leaves that hold on through frost.
You will not remember this night in a few weeks as you rake

summer into the woods and bury it with voices that will rise again
when you least expect it. They will move through you again and again,

long after you turn to the house against darkness, for the rest of your life.