SPRING


Five first crocuses burst into bird-brilliant bloom
and suddenly everything flies: behind a car
scraps of paper rise, two from a flock, startled dumb.
Some lives begin in abstraction; others end there.
If I find the child’s fist this universe bloomed from
I will close it again as my own five fingers,
say worlds as one sentence, fit them into a name
for gold overwhelming finches, feather by feather.
With leaves returned, we still hear birds but see them now
only when they fly.  It’s hard to see anything,
even when we hear it sing, even though we know
it’s there, even if we feel it filling our lungs.
Forsythia insists all that is is yellow.
None of this had to happen, but it had to be sung.

This poem is from a cycle of interlocked sonnets celebrating the seasons and weeks of the year.
Collected in Shadows of Houses (Etruscan Press, 2005)