The day begins as such:
suddenly awake, 3 a.m.,
the febrile hour, blank bedroom,
an open window,
black, indigo velvet blue
humid iris night,
moist and fragrant.
Silence.
Not even the owl’s hollow lament in the darkness.
Then, the creeping hours,
counting numbers, the clock,
the awakened child, crying,
lukewarm coffee on a limp couch,
a burgeoning ache in the skull,
a bit of despair before sunrise.
Driving the weeping child to school,
his sobs piercing pins,
the ever repeating highway,
parched pavement, soulless,
stoplights and clichéd intersections.
Defeated,
unable to comfort him, quell his fears,
and my own hasty tears, a loss of hope,
and a longing.
Longing like a web whose tendrils
entangle with strands of my hair,
stick to my fingertips, bother my lips.
Its pleading insistence, its obsessiveness
possesses my thoughts,
makes them heavy, weighs them down,
a temporary enslavement.
Late morning, the longing peaks
as it sometimes does.
Relief, with a sprinkling of shame.
But gradually the day quiets,
stretches itself across the hours,
relaxes into afternoon. The ache subsides.
The day could end now, in mid-afternoon,
alone on the bench by the pond,
the neurotic squirrel rustling in the ivy,
the floating westward of clouds,
a passing train interrupts the trickling water and mud,
which disguises invisible frogs
who lazily contemplate the act of mating.
A southern afternoon, genteel,
flushed, but not yet one
where sweat grows on backs of knees.
A pair of ducks going about their aquatic business.
I center myself on this warm wood, on these long dead trees,
pebble present,
comforted by a background of wind making the pines swirl above,
green emerging shyly from the garden’s corners, punctuated by
a conspicuous burst of daffodils, flirtatiously yellow.
A poem emerges like a mushroom,
or perhaps a crocus
from the drowsy moss.
I hear my own measured heartbeat,
sunlight sifts through the earliest leaves,
tree buds on the eve of eruption,
pink, tender explosions,
wind the only thing that stirs still waters,
bark of a paper birch flutters, sleepily, in the flowered breeze.
In twelve hours, from despair to this--
this day in March,
abruptly summer,
and now a blessed hour alone
with my own mind,
in bliss, in spring.
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