Late Spring

Today it is 50 degrees! I peeled off a layer of wool! Another poem that mentions sex! What is spring if not about sex!

Late Spring


I had almost given up on
leaves and blossoms
and the color called blue.

The world had been swaddled,
rain clouds, snow clouds, clouds of emotion,
scud, if that’s a word,
batting and heft.

Then yesterday, nondescript
eruptions on
a nondescript tree.
They were the dirty train of a wedding dress,
they were the accumulation of
tissues from this year’s flu season.

Then yesterday there were
purple corsages emerging from beauty bark,
fake almost, like an Easter centerpiece
someone forgot to take down.

It is almost easier to not want things
to let the callouses form,
to be cataracted.
Now I am bracing myself
for fuschia, I cite it in all my poems
about spring.
Any day now.

It is the way love sometimes comes
when you’ve (not quite) given up looking.
Or when you haven’t had sex in a while
and then do and suddenly it’s all you want.
Spring is like an orgasm,
some seasons are slow to begin,
some sputter,
some start early and keep going.

Spring and sex are fireworks.
So many moments and nuances,
starts and stops
so many different kinds,
the male orgasm from bottle rockets to roman candles.
I always liked the ones called ground bloom flowers.

They are compact, packed tight
like a lipstick tube with a fuse,
like the trees now, steadying for beauty,
like the branches, their tips dipped
in mystery.

Once lit, the ground bloom flowers spin,
gasp and sputter on the earth,
they linger in the air in colored smoke.
The way summer whispers
of what came before remembering
bright exploding petals,
the way lovers lay together after,
just breathing.