Summer Reading 

In the back yard

there was always jazz

and marijuana

and burgers cooking.

And on Friday nights

you could hear women’s voices

drifting down from fire escapes:

      mira,

                    oye,

              sabor, 

like birds trilling

in the cool ailanthus leaves.

Someone always had something

funny to say.

I caught myself laughing along

more than once,

though maybe I only half understood

the joke or my need

to pretend I wasn’t listening

absorbed as I was with some book of poems

some other interpreted world,

leaning back through the open window

to catch the light,

the inflection.