April and March, overcurious about sex,

thump against the screen door.

Lovelessness in these months

seems a travesty,

like wigs in sherbet colors, too loud against

the season’s paradisal light.

/

Snowdrops looking tatty.

They don’t feel the threat

that I would feel.

/

Investigating his wish to die,

he goes to a teaching hospital.

The puppet feels the hand at times,

wildflowers, their underneath.

/

The season lays palely

on a white platter,

its calm faded eye looks

far beyond us.

We sense our own claims

shrinking.

/

For fear of the winter’s teeth,

the spring queen had them pulled.

Now it cannot chew,

it must subsist on slop.

Now its face has no mouth,

and its hair never saw scissors.

The queen folds her mind over it,

as if discovering a new crystal.

/

If word can become flesh,

now leaning its forehead against cool glass,

now discovering a passion

for Thomas Hardy,

can’t it be the spur that coaxes

out the strangest beast

within the beast, the spirit?

/

The cat in heat is

in the grip of a new idea:

she barks!

/

The sense of the season is pursued through

its reprimands: crocuses and pansies,

snowdrop, scilla, a Tête-à-Tête

daffodil. Tulips, peonies,

azaleas, and hyacinths.

Jack-in-the-pulpit.

/

Affection chains thy tender days.

Candles burning into their tins.

/

In the spring the quinces

/

Like a water-flower dropped

in a glass of water,

spring grows—

/

at times meaning

the world, its fan of pages;

other times, only conscious

of something turning.

/

The grip of solitude—

/

All my wet trees, breathing happily

/

From half-dark to half-dark,

I read autumn poems in spring.

Buson writes about stepping

on his dead wife’s comb

in their dark bedroom.

In fact, she outlived him by thirty-one years.

The chill from that comb, and the snap

of eros and solitude and imagining,

all in flower.

/

Threes conclude into ones,

as in the Christian mysteries.

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce.

/

What is the heart of the problem?

The flaring March lily subverts

all our emotional gourmandizing,

like a serene, inviolable erotomane

cupping its ear to listen to our true secrets.

/

The explorer with his walleye

and fading map peers into the distance.

He is so far from where he started,

and wasn’t this the point?

To have the cookbook turn

into parable, or vice versa,

it didn’t matter. Now, it was as if

he were a new pair of scissors

biting into a clean sheet of paper.

Rupture, instead of continuity.

He wills his eyeball into place

and walks boldly into the conditions.

/

The heart’s best trick?

For the one and only spring you will be given this year,

let your happiness crawl all over the floors.

/

Spate of thundershowers in spring.

It has an intellectual appeal,

pointing to nothing.

/

Now the coldness merely asks you

to tear your life apart

and begin again.

Pilgrim, throw it away, make it larger.

/