Thursday, April 23, 2015

Poem a day 2015: 23

Waiting for It

I’m waiting for the poem to come to me,
looking out the window into slow moving
clouds over the gently waving branches
of a still-leafless tree, marking two pelicans
as they dive from the white into the blue,
flapping in tandem, tracing big circles
across my vision.

The birds this morning
shouted from the bare trees, promising
warmer weather, the eventual arrival of
summer: silky hot skies, flowering shrubs,
the hiss of cicadas stretching the air wider.

I’m waiting for the poem to come to me,
stretched out on my chaise under two
layers, skin still vaguely chilled by the
retrograde weather, the crisp wind,
frozen mud flavored by yesterday’s
mocking snowflakes.

I’m waiting for it
to burst onto the scene with trumpets
and tigerlilies, with explosions of leaves
and clusters of cottonwood seeds borne
in puffs across the river trail, with dandelions
like punctuation marks across every lawn --

I’m waiting for the naked summer poem
to arrive and demand we strip off all these
heavy clothes, run across hot sidewalks, and
dive into each other with sweaty abandon.

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