Late May
And lie at
last by the little stream that brings
all gods to
truth.
Julia
Randall
The Bennett
Spring Road
A morning ago
snow the hold of it in the globe
of rain fat and
splattering against the raised window
glass. Stiff wind let it drift loose & lose its
bearings
indeed if it had
bearings at all this late in
the season. An accident happening in the
atmosphere? An arctic blast??
Muster of dust
in the cold rapid
clouds? (what kind of cold are clouds,
don’t you ever
wonder?) But this it wasn’t enough
to do much but
bring us to wonder. & to hunker
the rumps of the
songbirds in their
boxes &
grasses & bits of bramble on bending
branches to dance
to pause the persistent
gobs of their
offspring for just one doubled
second and then one more– this chilling extravagant wind –
it’s 32 degrees and tomorrow it will be June. So I took myself
to the roadside swathe of lady’s slippers I saw two weeks
ago beneath all those stunted hemlocks. They were still
living after all these weeks & still hidden
in the middle of the
evergreen’s peculiar camouflage. One
steady drop of
water on the skin of their pocketbook
of veins. What remains but that I knelt in the wet
and made of them
their dozens while the wrens
while the wood
ducks while the mallards & song
sparrows . . . but
we are golden here, right? So golden.
Precious purse this
rose gold rising from the snow
a month ago hello to all this hello to the season's last
blast
of snow.
