When I look down, I see the season’s blinding flowers,
the usual mesmerizing and repellent artifacts:
a frat boy who turns too sharply from my stare,
a cardinal capturing vision in a lilac bush
on my walk home. I’m left to long
even for simple dangers. From the waist up
it’s still winter, i left world behind
a long time ago; waist down it’s catching
up, a woodpecker out my window is mining grubs
from some nameless tree squirrels scramble over.
When I turn back it’s gone, I hadn’t realized
this had gone so far. (Everywhere I look
it’s suddenly spring.
learn moreThese are the years of the empty hands. And what
were those just past, swift with the flash of alloyed hulls
but carrying no cargo? Outside our lives, my mythical
America, dingy rollers fringed with soot deposit
cracked syringes and used condoms on beaches tinted gray
by previous waves, but when an hour waits just a moment,
everything begins again.
