Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine poet laureate.

Here are two poems for summer. Candice Stover of Mount Desert Island opens with a tender lyric about a moment that is, as she puts it, “suspended between sleep and waking.” In a second lyric, Jacob Fricke of Belfast takes up the same theme.

Briefly, Enough

By Candice Stover

this morning light trembled

through my lashes

as I drifted in and out

of sleep, cheek resting

on my love’s chest

I could follow every breath

a breeze passing over our bodies moved

like another breath, another

kind of breathing, until it seemed

we were drowsing on an open vessel

on a body of water we did not need to name

Summer

By Jacob Fricke (for Jennifer Hickey)

I touched the face of midnight once

though it was scarcely noon —

the breezes ghost-like in the grass

presented their perfume.

I fell on fields beneath the sky

and summer was my bed,

the heat and shade for counterpane,

the ground to cup my head.

Then — sweet, sweet, sweet my falling lid —

the skies began to close,

and blank before my sluggish eyes,

a world for my repose.