Survival in the Spring
The fool moon
is an unjust cliche
passing directly overhead
and I've ached out of exhaustion
so many times the tired millions
of meteoric terrors, media-mad errors,
the pa-rum-pum-pum of Christmas,
now long behind us, is only the echo
of a car crash we never witnessed,
only heard in the siren song
beneath the loud roar of daily trains
passing along the highway,
and our soft whispers
muted in each minute of distance
remains as a glassy tranquility
in the lunar space, the ice nine
of the night sky, as the dust swirls
into a sound so lonely,
a solace at the end of March,
we thank the great sky
for no more murder
The white stripe of the local skunk,
confused as the buds on trees,
in unending misunderstanding
of the new weather patterns,
limbs freezing then thawing,
chilling over again, forgotten
as the breeze, teasing towels
of numerous cold showers
for all seasons in a single day,
twenty-four-hour revelations
of the mountain lion warning us
with a growl in the Gaian solace
at midnight into the back-stepping
mystery of the morning, cars running
late, buses running late, trucks,
running furious late to avoid garbage beasts,
cement mixers awake, alive as thirsty ants,
churning up into government, then corporations,
into bellicose budgies happy to pave the world
Gone are those long lost minutes
where you unleashed your moorings,
when your screamed out your sorrows
and locked your mechanical door
without a master as the snow storm's
marshal lawyer, a colonel clinking
his dry cup for a salute of sunless,
derisive, jarring melodies unheard,
the fire of the gut-rotten belly,
rip-ribbed fat, toothless and mean
in his oily flannel cotton shirt:
O, who is chuckling now, you cheating
Chubby Checker! We are free of you.
Free! And winter is a dead and past
as we feel well enough
to start worrying again
about what is normal,
as our eyes, moist in emotion,
push out the main street iron
ions of ancient dirt, seeking
to join the information flow
of geese, buzzards and eagles
flying north into the blindness
of the king, the queen, the jesters
jeering in the crowd, the black crows,
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere
to regain unearthly sanity
