First dandelions—at the neighbor’s—
have already lost their bloom,
and at the first break of light,
their heads just above the grass
shiver and gleam—frothy drops
of tiny misty clouds, raising silver notes
over the dream of searching silence—
downy blowballs waiting
for a brush of passing breeze,
so at last they will be relieved
of the lightest of the burdens they bear on
between what is and what is not—
and they could release, even to a poem
like this,
letters—flying seeds.
Dogwood
white splatters
the hedges of the woods,
and
small violets of April too
have come along the trails
to tally up the palette,
so
that, as if by some tacit plan,
or by communion, female hands
ache likewise to change and paint,
along
with the dispatch of scent,
set once more to form
another embossing spell.
For
April is a month that’s amical
to welcoming again such wordless,
obliquely urging ornament
which brings the season underway.
For
April is an aperture—
un trou, une ouverture à Aphrilis,
a budding urging, swelling into spills.
Yet it
makes me wonder how low and close
to earth,
parallel to the red of cardinals in flight,
those discreet violets
Touché—but
till then
not more than a little,
something one might confuse
for nothing at all—
had one
not heard,
or forgotten, a few
of the opening bars
sounding through the air,
tacitly
tuning
what ought to be
with what merely is—
until, all at once,
a hand,
and then
a finger, closed in;
and by
that one stroke,
which any good musician
or painter would admire,
from
nowhere—though where
had it hidden all this time?—
she
made him remember,
ever so lightly,
as if she had been winged,
her
fine and discreet measure,
that delicate art
of anti-gravity.
