Spring

1

Lovely ladies parade the turnpikes, announcing
Poptarts!, waterskis!, potpipes!, declaring
New deals for ice-cream crowns, holograms,
Novel conventions, one-on-one luncheons
With Earthworm Jim. King for a Day, One and All!,
They flout. All day they pass with their shiny glyphs,
Such florid palpitations of the comic book
Bubbles, as we drive through all this laughing,
Quivering with footnotes of the taxable parables!
Back home the clouds unpeel and light squirts out,
Setting all the alarm clocks spluttering and ululating
In the garden. The slugs churn and the twig-spry
Robins clop and snit in the bouncing holly. The cats bone
In the dandelions. The fathers congratulate mothers
For their well-digested heavens. The kids writhe
In the TV room. Sudden phonecalls map the Hollywood
Dreams against the hospitalized Jesus. Mythologies
Laze crazily in the foxhole garage. Grandfather
Digs in the fenced-in yard, while minijets slather congratulations
Above the minimall. The teenager scratches the popular songs
From his frontal lobe at the morning lecture. Spring
Is beginning, creatures waking
To the waking of it all. Springing. The moon rises,
Bouncing back all these satellite images and all
Is as a melting mountain. Blooming. Booming.

With the regularity of roadside flatulence,
All the roosters play the balalaika at the edge
Of the flammable elementary school. “I’m a farm”
Is what they tell each schoolboy to sing
To each schoolgirl, in the deepening slate
Of the computed page, parasailing into Sunday
Contortions. We sleep late, relaying messages
Lesser than we thought. Outside, the barnyard’s still
Catatonic with the torpid jism of summer,
Mumbling in the remains of its December despairing.
I thought we had gotten farther than this. It’s typical, you know:
Such prehensile liquid gymnastics trace poorly
The portals. Febrile lickings in the mounted morning. The artery
In its lingual capacities pulsing until pounding
The frontal walls, as with plosives at the picnic
You pass me a hot dog, but remain fully clothed.
One room strokes the moans of another, the bandolier
Jetting of the keyboard to mainframe, the circus of circuits
To fray and maim the surfboard of the Chewbacca Other.
"In the story we were Kolokotronic, surely,
But in the story THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
(Let’s be real here) you couldn’t be more wrong.
In fact, that is not what I meant, not at all."
A glyph in the grass winks, starred and striped,
Already accounted for, and Grandfather wakes with a wet fart.



2

after finding again our forests
as we wrote them
might we find some old essential treasures at the roots?

the plurality of rivers
afford only bits
like randomly plucked harp strings;
the old story

that sailors feared the new
instruments:
"they just need a couple days...
to sometimes... process it"

charting coasts,
"we are fallen men"
in zooming water,
clatter of brown, green,

red, white
particles fallen
into stones,
this meat, thought,

plasma and bone,
ringing in the stream
with tracesof the bigger
whorl wherein

we cohered,out of which we
slipped, to leave
you to build this, O
the strong men

like rivers
can bear the mountains
knowing clouds
& ocean

(sisters and mothers)
made of the water
as this clutter becomes
a river of stone

based only on
the particles
clapped from the sea,
the wind,

"you missed the rainy part"
faces appear in the falling
of the waters
over the stones