August, and Everything After

August is a thief who comes dressed as a gift: the peach at its most golden the hour before it drops, the garden giving everything away like a house that knows it's being sold. The children sense it ending. You can see it in the way they stay outside past calling, past the streetlights, past the first star, as if they could hold July by refusing to go in. And the light—that particular amber only August owns— pours over everything with the generosity of someone who knows this is the last round and the tab means nothing now. I sit on the porch and let it spend. The cricket starts its evensong. A screen door somewhere closes like a sentence that knows how it ends. Summer, you thief. You beautiful, slow thief. I watched you take everything and I didn't lock a single door.