34 Spring poems

The green catalpa tree has turned All white; the cherry blooms once more. In one whole year I haven’t learned A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair; The trees and I will soon be bare. The trees have more than I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach. The pear tree lets its petals drop Like dandruff on a tabletop. The girls have grown so young by now I have to nudge myself to stare. This year they smile and mind me how My teeth are falling with my hair. In thirty years I may not get Younger, shrewder, or out of debt. The tenth time, just a year ago, I made myself a little list Of all the things I’d ought to know, Then told my parents, analyst, And everyone who’s trusted me I’d be substantial, presently. I haven’t read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. And smile above their starchy collars. I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions; One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s. Lacking a source-book or promotions, I showed one child the colors of A luna moth and how to love. I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying. I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die. I have not learned there is a lie Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger; That my equivocating eye Loves only by my body’s hunger; That I have forces, true to feel, Or that the lovely world is real. While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves, My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves. There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth. Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists.

1. It is cold enough for rain to coagulate and fall in heavy drops. Tonight a skin of ice will grow over the bones of the smallest bush, making it droop like the wrist of someone carrying a heavy suitcase. This moving on, from season to season, is exhausting and violent, the break from the Berlin Wall of winter especially. Like a frostbitten hand coming to life, I color first with warmth, then with pain. Thawing, letting the great powers go their own way, in rivers and in flesh, frightens me, as this day warns me of an icy night. 2. Each year I am astonished at the havoc wrought on other lives: fathers made tiny by cancer; a mother swollen around a bad heart "brought on by aggravation." To suffer is to do something new yet always the same— a change of life from the sexual dread. Some women wish they were men, some men wish they were dead; still, there is coin in suffering . . . It makes us rich as Croesus in his golden tears, and we are rarely hated for it. This coin I store in a purse made of my mother's milk and flesh, which God says I must not mix. I use it instead to seek pleasure. 3. Walking around with this thing in me all day, this loving cup full of jelly, waiting for you to come home—seven o'clock, eight o'clock, eight-thirty . . . What could be more important than love? I can't imagine; you can. Not a good day, not about to get better. 4. The bird comes complete with heart, liver, and neck-bone wrapped chastely in white paper. Still half-frozen, the legs are hard to separate. Inside, wax paper sticks to the ribs. I reach like a vet delivering pigs, or a boy finger-fucking a virgin. 5. Air the same sweet temperature inside the house as outside the house. Stepping up from the cellar with an armful of sheets, I listen for the dirge of flies under the chittering birds, both painfully loud. There is a stridency that's stubborn in a life grown by inches: the fat little fingers of buds bursting; ugly ducklings; the slow war of day against night. As I pin the swelling sheets with clothespins damp and too narrow at the mouth, I wonder how flies know to come out to feed the birds, and feast themselves on the new stillborn, this stubborn great chain of being.

The first crocus is always a surprise even when i planted it even knowing it would come hope is like that you plant it then you're surprised when it shows up

The mud is the first sign ugly and true and cold the mud is spring before spring knows it i walked through the field anyway my boots disagree