At 104th street
a great bulk of igneous rock
heaves itself from Central Park—
wet black-green in halide streetlight
like a breaching submarine.

I hadn’t seen this place before;
still, I passed, all a funk,
mind inside itself (a typical brood),
moving past with just a sidelong look.

By a low stone wall
at the foot of the cliff, a man
(black parka, pants
too long, high-top shoes)
leaned as if in muttered
collusion with the ground.

He spoke to someone as I passed
(I figured he was drunk).
“Fella,” I heard him say,
as if to me.
I stopped, and looking back,
saw from across the wall,
crouched on the side of the cliff
a raccoon, black-masked,
capacious gray coat,
tiny hands.

It sat there watching me,
or rather, just watching,
attentive to some
attraction I didn’t see.

And then another.
And another.
And all along that black expanse
must have been twenty raccoons
(I didn’t think they could be so varied)
quietly foraging, awaiting,
I came to understand,
the man in the black coat.

He threw bread to them
like the old pigeon lady in
Mary Poppins
and five or so gathered nearby
on the other side of the wall
not minding his humanness,
only eating.

“I come out here every night,” he explained.
“I don’t got a girlfriend anymore,
so I come out here
and feed them to **** time.”

He tore a piece from a half-gone baguette
and threw it to a little one.

“There’s like fifty of them now,” he said.
“There were twenty when I started;
they have four or five babies every spring.
Nobody knows they’re here except me.”

As he spoke, a baby raccoon
climbed up a sapling
by the wall, extending its sharp black nose
toward the man who held a scrap of bread.
The raccoon took it unreluctantly.
I flinched at the thought of tiny
raccoon teeth missing their mark
on my index finger.
But habit was fixed and easy
here between man and raccoon.

“They’ll come up and sit on my shoulder...”
he said at last and then trailed off.

I stood and watched for several minutes—
this assembly of raccoons
along the black cliff
and the man who called them “fella” and “baby.”

At last he said with satisfaction,
“They call me the raccoon man.”
Deciding he had said his bit,
I gave a soft, enthusiastic whistle
between my teeth
as if to say,
“Well done.”

At 105th street, I felt remorse
for not having said more
to the man who drew
his nocturnal congregation every night
right there on Central Park West.
And in a gesture of regret,
I turned slightly back as I walked
to the see his black form
bent over the low wall
dispensing bread.

Cardinal couple
at the bird-feeder today,
he all in red,
she in orange-gray.

They’re not like us,
this mismatched pair,
she on the snow below,
he circling in the air.

They never part
but seldom unite,
conjoined by love
and freed by flight.

Angry
nuthatch
in the maple today.
All Confederate gray
except for that russet shirt
and tiny Zorro mask.
“Yank!” He called, insulted,
as I trudged by,
garbage in hand.
Then he was gone,
in the brambles
of a barren
spirea.

It is a small dish—
no more than four inches in diameter,
but heavy in the hand
like a too-big coin
or a medal from some county fair.

Gray-blue enamel on copper
with a tiny winter scene:
a trio of white fir trees
their branches painted
like tiny hand-prints
stacked one
upon the other.

And just above them,
two blue snowflakes
in a sea of cool enamel,
this tiny dish of winter.

You bought it on a whim,
I’m sure,
at Wildweed in Aspen
(that Seventies store
cluttered with thick ceramic bowls
and macramé)
some January
when Christmas things
were fifty percent off.

In that annual ritual
when you brought the Christmas
boxes up from the basement,
it was there among
the old glass ornaments
wrapped in decades-old
tissue paper.

It’s too small for candy—
really just a bit of whimsy
for the marble-top
in the living room
or a bedside table.

Now it sits in my kitchen
on an old green
step-back cupboard
all year round.

I will not wrap it in tissue paper
after Christmas.
No, I will not hasten
the cycle of the years
any more than time has done.

I will let my distracted gaze
fall now and then
on that little dish,
with its two blue snowflakes.

And I will feel
with mild surprise
a brief stab of panic
deep in my chest
rise and pass like a shadow
or a memory.

Impressive in his houndstooth coat,
he is noticeably provoked
by crimes against Wallace Stevens.

Beneath his office window
a student meandering to class
takes a twig
of boxwood in his grasp and,
without a moment's thought,
casually plucks it off.

Seizing upon an epiphany,
(or moment of regret)
the Professor turned and said to me:
“We shall all be plucked in time,
or driven down beneath the tread
of farmer feet, in mud as red
and thick as congealing blood!
Driven down like grain
by men with callused hands.”

The world's weight now suspired,
he turned his gaze
to the walkways below,
signalling, I surmised, that I should go.

Death,
I had to concede
is an undignified affair:
random and incoherent in its sweep.
We are naked, riven,
utterly alone, and strewn,
once reaped,
into the soil that was our home.

But not the tall, brown men
of the whispering halls,
where fates are drawn and snipped,
(where capacious noses lightly drip)—
they are plucked with the tenderness of frost,
tucked into filing drawers,
and lost.

It is January, I know,
but there is warmth in me for now
as if Spring had shaken off low clouds
and washed away these ragged heaps of snow.

It will pass,
this early bloom of light,
and we shall turn to trudging, once again,
the icy paths we walk from car to house.

Like that fugitive queen,
you leave Winter in your wake.
Wield that weather gently, love:
You bring a Spring to us who urge you on.

Magisterial,
you presided over night,
crouching in a nimbus
of yellow light outside our door.
Indifferent to our approach,
sagacious Buddha,
scourge of crickets.

Quiet is your wrath, little cat. Marsupial-eyed, impassive,
You sit like Rhadamanthus on his terrible throne.
We beneath your crouching glare are
Burdened by your malice—
As you lose interest
In us and
Doze.

High upon a basalt cliff,
carpeted round with lily fields
and blanching poppys' lips,
high upon a basalt throne,
Persephone sits.

Frail as lily wands,
lithe as Syrinx songs upon a reed.

And there, below,
grim Sisyphus,
and there the Centaur-sire
spins upon a wheel of fire.

And there, Tantalus sits grinning
mumbling prayers of sin and sinning,
hunkered down to steal the peach
which quickly leaps beyond his reach.

Or there, a hundred weary sisters
with a hundred leaking jugs
and a cistern dry as bone.

High upon the basalt cliff,
still as infant breath upon the air,
Persphone, sits and stares.

At Singing Hills*

Down upon the earth, boy,
brushing dirt from broken flints.
The woman, tall, in khaki pants,
slowly stands and squints.

Down upon the earth with
pockets full of stones.

A hundred yards across the land
where knife-grass spears the sand
a bullsnake sleeps in sunlight.

Speak of arrowheads and Utah,
you,
with dignified excitement;
speak of ostrich eggs!

You and I, she'd say,
Galapagos!
Where armored turtles
heave their bulks across the land.

Here Mother Earth lies naked
to her bones.
Flint bones,
in sun as white as lamplight.

With your Thermos cup in hand
talk of arrowheads again—
or Galapagos—
Where giant turtles rule the land!

It was by our old garage door
beneath a spot long favored by birds
to build nests of mud and string.
The neighbor’s cat had not yet found it,
though by dusk its deathbed would be
merely flattened grass and a tuft of down.

Perhaps I had seen this one
the day before, its head turned skyward,
beak gaping in a torment of appetency.

It was a juvenile—
not long expired, I knew,
one black eye neither open nor closed,
but stilled in that way
the dead gaze without seeing.

Its plumage was nearly complete:
the tell-tale russet breast,
the mottled gray.
So near to taking its perilous leap—
one unforgiving day, or maybe two,
had been the space between
flight and fall.

This was a lovely work of feather and flesh,
an inchoate beauty,
its pinions and bristles nearly made.

I nudged it with my boot
and glimpsed beneath the wing
a naked leg and trident foot—
all reptile scale and claw.

With less than a thought,
I let the thing roll back
upon itself, wing upon leg,
to await the coming
of the marauding cat.

There is something about churches—
the sanctuary filling slowly,
brass ***** pipes arrayed like halberds
in a medieval arsenal,
stooped ushers handing out programs
as the congregation
accumulates softly
like snow.

And the pulpit—like a queen
in a hive of wooden pews
all of polished walnut,
stands hushed and expectant.

(I know within that pulpit
there is a place to put cough drops,
a legal pad, second pair of glasses.)

Sanctuaries have a peculiar smell,
redolent of potted lilies,
Youth Dew perfume,
aging hymnals,
the suspired breath
of five hundred faithful
lifting their voices to that soaring
Byzantine dome.

I was glad for your presence that day,
the sound of your marvelous
voice, the warm sense
of your shoulder next to mine.
You cradled a hymnal
benevolently in your hand
as though you were baptizing a child.

"Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!"

I sang more loudly, I suppose,
for gratitude that you were with me.
I held my hymnal with more care,
sang and looked up more hopefully
to that pulpit than I might otherwise
have done on any given Easter.
I prayed more ardently for good things to happen,
thought more kindly of the man
beside me who wouldn’t make room
when we three entered the pew
but stared blandly ahead as if
waiting for an opera to begin.

When the minister spread his arms
in benediction and bade us all go in peace,
we stayed to hear the postlude
and watch the Easter crowd
wind its way to the narthex
and spill out into the boisterous
parade on Fifth Avenue.

I sat there and listened with you
as the organist played his sonorous farewell.
When I was a boy sitting next to you in church,
you might gently pat my thigh
when the organist’s final note
passed through the sanctuary
like a great bird in flight.
You would smile as if to say,
“You made it through the whole service!”

On this Easter, when the hymn began,
and the mighty ***** notes swelled around us
like God’s own voice in song,
it was the thought of your shoulder near mine,
your hands upon the pew,
that halted my singing for a moment,
to let a silent bolt of longing
pass through me
like a solitary dog crossing a road.
Then it was gone, the thought,
but so, too, was your palpable nearness,
the idea of your voice
ringing through the church
like a celebration.

Shivering in the tempest of his eye,
go to him, martyred spirit, go
where sleep is like oblivion, pure,
and pain falls from the broken soul.

Washed by the gaze of a dreadful god,
pursued through the years, Io, chaste, unheard,
in the dust of a somnolent world, you
have gone where darkness bathes the naked.

You have traced the silent correspondence,
have seen, smelled, tasted infinity
where life is a distant flower, where
to sleep is to wake in an empty bower.

The touch of a mother's hand upon
your quivering arm, c'est goût Néant;
the life of oblivion for the ravished soul,
the *****, the wine of dreamless sleep.

What the infinitude sought so long?
Where behind confused words
lives unity, crepuscular, deep,
where entropy is order, order is complete?

Now, translated beneath this ground
you may sleep  un sommeil profonde,
undisturbed by setting suns,
still unheard by clamoring men.

Sleep, pious poet, sleep, beneath
the unworried sway of timeless worlds,
where sound, smell, touch, and sight
blend as in a sensed but senseless night.

From the scaffold
we see most clearly.

From these heights I know the stature
of all the works and days of man;
and from here, enthroned by these two beams,
straddling these two worlds,
I see the oyster heaps of cities
where the children we shall leave
assume our places
at the cafe, brothel, cathedral,
and here.

We upon the scaffold
bid whispered farewells
to our accusers
only for the instant
time takes to reunite us.

And with the iron descent of ruin
and the silencing of the mind
and the extinction of the soul
is struck the next toll
of the ceaseless funerary bell.

These are the empty visions
of men sentenced to go before the rest—
who shall not call back from the dripping caverns
that light is dancing on the farthest wall.

We three sat
on the stoop
on Thursday night
eating watermelon.
Our Georgian brick
building
crouched behind us,
the front door held open
by someone’s flip-flop.

The day had been hot,
and when it began
to rain,
the sidewalk steamed
with every drop

until there were no more
drops but the evening’s
deafening applause
and silver spears of rain
shattering themselves
on the wet-black street.

We piled our melon rinds
in mixing bowls
and all stood
wordlessly
to go.

We had talked that night
as students do;
ambling about,
trying new things out:
Pater, Pound,
Benjamin, Foucault.

Distracted now and then,
we watched a desperate moon
clamber gently
up an arching oak
and jump
in the sad, still way
that moons
so often do.

In the silences
of our conversation,
the locusts stirred their thrum,
shrill and urgent,
talking one to the other—
or one to all—
in the noisy communion
that is a Virginia night.

Nighttime’s business
had halted, though,
to let the sky be unburdened.

In the rain’s roar,
our watermelon all but gone
and Baudelaire
(for the moment)
spent,
we'd grown unexpectedly
silent
as if to note
something sacred
in the night.

I.
We laugh about it as we age:
Becoming our parents.
Women, about wearing housecoats,
Kleenex in the sleeve, anile,
Muttering vague execrations
At the husband
Or the cat.

We men, about thinning hair,
Shoulder no good
For throwing,
Expressions from another time:
“You’re a sight for sore eyes!”

It scares and comforts us,
I suppose,
That we are destined to reprise
The fading song our parents played
On their way through life.
We cannot help
But long to know,
How the melody will go
When life’s light flickers
And dies.

II.
In all those silly ways, it’s true,
That I am becoming you—
Skinny legs,
Thick in my middle,
Age spots on these hands,
Dappled as a trout
But rough and dry,
Like yours.

I even guess
I ache as you ached
To see my child prepare for college.
I yearn, as I think you yearned,
To know how time swept by
Like a gust in autumn
Rolling before it the russet leaves of days,
Passing with no more than
A gentle breath upon the face.

In these ways, too,
I am becoming you,
Or always was:
Troubled, soulful, anxious,
Stirred by life’s incantatory dirge.

III.
And yet I know
That you were something great,
While I am merely aging.

When you trudged
Your path through Hell,
Your soul surged,
As if to run life’s gauntlet
Were somehow nourishment
For the man you knew to become.

My hells are simple matters:
Midlife’s usual trials,
Banal and contained,
Seldom rising to heroic.

You—you strove with God,
Fulminating and proud.
Like Ulysses,
You fell spent upon your deathbed,
Glowing like the ember of a demigod.

IV.
I shall become you
In all the little ways that life allows:
Absent-minded,
Saturnine.
But I have not lunged upon Antaeus,
Nor ever will.

Still, I am your son.
That right is mine—
Though my hells are not Hades
And my foes are not Gods.
Yet, I long to give a loud report
When my final day is shot;
To have striven well with Self,
Subdued, at least, my mundane.

That much I hope to do
In my own way
In becoming you.

Merely
two turgid leaves
of purple—
more haiku
than sonnet.
Yet, like Caesar’s
Tyrian robe,
there is grandeur
in you.

Come to the window, dear;
listen to the sea-swell
comb its patterns on the sand.

Stand by my side and hear
the clanging of a buoy-bell,
breakers crash upon the strand.

Tonight, then, you and I
may stand and breathe the evening
waiting hopefully to see

the dusk-fire turn to night,
the drunken ***** go weaving
from their holes into the sea.

A year,
one year has passed.
It crept down the alley in the back
darkening the neighbors' houses
brick by brick.

And now I see it in our faces
and all the shadowed places we forget.
The year has moved from left to right,
from salad plate to coffee cup.
It shows its shadow when your cheeks lift up
to smile, and underneath your lip,
it stained your teeth precisely
where you sip
your tea.

You drum your fingers on the sugar tin
and laugh from deep inside your blouse.

But I have seen its wake;
and soon I shall make myself
awake at six and shave to Debussy.
I shall bring the decades to their knees.

I know you laugh behind your eyes,
yet, still, someday you’ll cry out loud,
“I wish I’d stuck with him
and hadn’t drummed my fingers
on the sugar tin.”

By some grace of fate we sit
Quietly, talking of life;
We, at this place where roads meet.
Where worried travelers
Ask “whither?” and “whence?”

Is your sense renewed at this meeting?
And do you see in my face
The stern advance of age? Detect
In my voice a mortal despair?

I have looked at you and seen
The child in red shoes
Who studied with knitted brow
Her *****, wounded finger.

I have seen the girl who ran
Unsteadily like a colt
On slender legs; who laughed
At Time as though
Years bear gifts for children.

And as we trudged
By different paths toward this place,
I have never looked back
With as much longing
As I do today.

Kingfisher*

The deep, golden moments of winter
fly like geese above a field.
The kingfisher nests below
where the lake stirs like a breathing beast.

Fish jumps, once, twice, in the crystal air,
slaps silver side on the trembling pool.

These are the days of stillness,
of the morning sun's radiant
benediction on the settled hills.

Beyond the bristling slopes
gray with naked branch and twig;
beyond the mountain cloaked in fog
it sleeps, that nameless peace,
beyond embrace or longing.

Halcyon—
blue-green, sun-glancing
(fire to fire, man to god!),
from lake to pathless sky—
See! There! The breathless
bell-beat of its wings.

In this silent march of days,
at the moment least propitious,
with sunlight's faintest glow
upon that gleaming back—
it shall rise, arch, and fall.

And man shall see and say
with a nod, "It is all."

A forest of spring-green lilies
perforates the earth
between our house
and the sidewalk.

And you can think
of nothing else.

The great horned owl,
the naturalist told us,
has senses so wonderful
it can hear our hearts beating in our chests,
the rush of blood through our open arteries.
That's how, she said, it hunts its prey,
tiny mice hiding beneath the snow.
Discerning their tremulous pulses,
it bears down on them like doom from the pine branch,
reptile talons outstretched upon faceless snow.
Does the mouse’s pulse, I wondered, quicken
as the owl’s Valkyrie wings descend?

For one—me—unhunted by the raptor
there is a longing to be heard
to bare one’s chest to the aching ears of the bird
to beat the worried rhythm of my soul
to this listener, hoping vaguely for reply
or for succor.

Why this desire for this secret discourse,
this singing one to the other,
beating heart to bending ear?
We move, each day, among throngs of us,
crowds of us, bumping, passing,
every soul beating its peculiar drumbeat,
every street a percussive chaos—
joyous crescendos, dirges, incantations—
yet we are as silent to one another
as the timpani of the ninth
to its feverish creator.

This bird sits within its wood and wire enclosure
hissing at the passerby, irritated to be awake,
pine-cone shaped but for its feather “ears,”
absurdly lopsided on its swiveling head.
Still, it listens and looks
with a knowingness that makes me
linger hopefully by the cage-side.

For this infinite moment, I will whisper
to the interested, will pause discreetly
for the owl to look in my direction
and, with no more than a show
of its black, impassive pupils,
hear me.

That thing you gave me—
I have it still
all these years later.
I found it the other day,
half-hidden, like a folded sweater
in a forgotten trunk.

You were young then,
lovely, haggard
like an orchid softly wilting
in unforgiving heat.
Wasting amazon,
pain deep within your legs,
resting like a queen
on a stone sarcophagus.

When the boy read to you,
did you hear his stumbling words,
from the frayed blue book?
Or was your troubled mind
wandering elsewhere,
on some trackless, stubbled field?

He felt only the touch of your hand
on his hair, the warm pulse of your breath
on his forehead and eyelashes.

In the church balcony:
Water Music.
Fingers stretched above the keys,
pipe ***** bright and sonorous.
Down below, the congregants
gazed upon the pulpit
awaiting the benediction.
Soul souring,
heart filling.
God was great.

Shimmering like Artemis in her glade,
you stood reflected in a mirror
on the closet door,
gowned in emerald satin—
a last look at makeup
before he calls upstairs
that the car is ready.

You smiled
as you turned to go,
fabric swishing against your legs.
Uncertain memory insists you smiled,
if only momentarily to unclench
the grip upon your windpipe,
the blunt pain deep inside your femur,
the dark edge arcing at the horizon
in your dreams or waking gaze.

In that still stratum of existence,
that lilting stream of secret thought
where no son or daughter enters in,
there the soul walks with worry
day and night
lost in a whispered discourse.

We must have all bathed
in that gentle stream,
its silent water lapping at our feet.
When you looked up, distracted,
as if from reading
Donne or Herbert
your ruminations
cannot have been
unsensed.

That thing you gave me,
that dark gift,
I bear like a secret
beneath my winter coat.
I know you never meant it
to be mine.

But the glade was darkening
when you walked that field
and your gaze was fixed
worriedly
on a shimmering
in the distant woods.

I have not moved form off this porch,
this porch where sunlight falls
in tidy columns
on the overgrown grass below.

I have not moved,
nor have I slept,
but presided silently
over morning’s passing
and the slow, serious rise of the sun.

Neighborhood children,
heavy-headed, awkward,
kick a ball and scream
across the courtyard
where a lone gray boulder sits
and rows of houses crowd about.

The giant oak near the trailer park
casts shadows on a sleeping dog.

A tank-topped girl calls from the house
to the squinting boy
with a jar in his hand.

At the creek,
children squat with sticks in hand
and **** a dying frog.

Without a thought,
I have noted mother calls
rise and fall across the dell.

I have watched the giant oak
with one, great wooden arm
impale the earth and hold it still.
I have heard the mongrel pup whine
by the barbed wire fence.

And when the sun is tangled in the trees
I shall doze in the failing light
or replace this chair against the wall
where the wood is notched and gray.

When the late-day sun
sent a shaft of light
through my old screen door,
I saw the places
where the paint has peeled
(such felicitous light green paint!)
and the eye-hook latch
shows signs of rusting.

I changed the screen
not long ago,
yet three rough holes
disrupt its hazy plane
like insects in a web.

Outside, the autumn air
troubles the tired green
canopies of elms and oaks.

Summer lingers in little ways:
The blue cotton rug
inside our threshold
sits warm beneath a
slanting square of sun;
the lawn outside is dry
for want of watering.

Soon the breeze grows cool,
and when I go to
shut the door I see
a single strand of  gold
the wind has found to tease,
held fast for the moment
by the ragged screen.

You left today,
and now I feel
the autumn’s chill
more deeply in my bones.

Arbiter Elegans*

When we were young,
we pried the cavern's darkness with our eyes,
and every autumn evening
we outlasted even day,
until our shadows blended with the night.

Then we turned away
toward the village where we lived.

For we had hoped that time
had lasted with the years,
had linked us with that past
in some enchanted string of moments
from the first to what would be the last.

Breathlessly we paused outside the cave,
our faces shadowed by its mouth,
our ears straining for her cries
(growing weaker, we surmised,
with every day that aged her).

But in December when,
emboldened by our youth,
we stepped inside the cave
(not half as deep or dark as we had thought),
all we found
was an amber bottle dashed upon a rock.

That was years ago,
and I recall the empty faces of my friends
when we emerged,
and how our footsteps scuffed
and lifted up the dust
in our dismayed retreat
toward home.

You, bright-smiled sun-lover
descend on feet of flesh
past the hundred-headed best,
past the high-court Rhadamanthus.

And the hollow-gazing dead
look up from hollow homes,
and voices from the deep inquire,
"Whither now, oh flesh and bones?"

How odd that entropy is time’s measure—
that through the dissolution of the world
we know, time’s arrow swiftly flies its course—
irrevocable and unrelenting.
Yet isn’t there a certain artfulness
to time’s advance? The ineluctable,
the crease of wrinkle in the lover’s cheek,
a river’s tireless sculpting of its banks?
In all the scything, striving, dying, all
the loss, the grief, the thievery of years,
there is design of a kind—a subtle mind—
deaf to prayers though always true to mission.
Though time has swept us, love, in its advance,
there’s music there, I think, by which to dance.

Winter’s length is measured
in your eyes.
And from our words
I can discern
that Spring steps hesitantly
around our brittle souls.

I know I have not weathered well.
I have not weathered well.

And is that why you cannot tell
me (the one who shares your cell)
what secret shadows
winter cast on you,
what aches it conjured
in your willow-lovely bones?

The Adirondacks shimmer
white to gray
as restless clouds
muster, murmur, and pass.

Am I vain to think
that your soul throws
itself against that swirling sky,
shares its passing moods,
broods as it broods,
‘til spring’s uncertain hope
blooms in your eyes?

I had not hoped, or thought,
to find that destination,
that broken patch of gravel
where the trees give way.

For as long as I had walked
with head bent low to the hill
and feet scrambling hard and fast
against the crumbling ground

I gave no thought to destinations
or places where the pathway ends.

And now, the long-followed trail
has ended, ceased where the forest
parts like a milling crowd
at the passing of a king's grim retinue.

And though the mountains up and up,
ascend with Titan shoulders naked
to the forceful blue, the path
has ceased to follow.

But as I climbed
I gave no thought to destinations
or places where the pathway ends.

It was a taking-away for you—
eight years of Providence
slow unfolding—
like cloud-shadows
passing over low, green fields—
as the obedient soul
yields to its story’s ending.

Perhaps I shall yield as well
at a point I cannot foretell—
though you may see
an altered course:
a truck weaving up
the blind-side of a hill,
or the lonely iceberg
sitting utterly still.

Pale purple crocuses
crowd beneath the apple tree
by the stone foundation
warmed by a mid-March sun

April, I know, brings spring
but also snow
feather-flaked and heavy
bends the creeping rose
low to the garden’s cheek

If the cold should come again
will the huddled crocus
mustering crowd
of luminous stem and petal
peek head from snow
or bow at last
a quiet submission
to harken Spring
with its early passing