Author's Note: Each summer, noted poet (and noted gardener)  Marge Piercy conducts a juried workshop -- the Piercy Poetry Intensive, as she calls it -- near her home on Cape Cod. At the conclusion, she and her husband and fellow gardener, novelist/playwright Ira Wood, host participants at a party in their spectacular garden. 

In the poet’s garden
for Marge Piercy

In the poet’s garden one summer evening 
in June rows of leafy enjambments stop 
at the edge of a lush planting of blossoming 

trochees and alongside the muted petals 
of shade-loving tercets while a simile like a snake
slithers through a bed of perennial metaphors

that spread outward and over the fern 
hill to kiss tidy plots where amphibrachs 
are draping a trellis and underfoot 

anapests are sprouting and iambs abound.
In the poet’s garden rhymes climb pink 
spondees at the foot of a synechdoche 

of rhythm and hyperbole. Metonomies 
now grow where once only concrete was. 





Lines In Late April
for April T. upon hearing the prognosis

April has been characteristically brief,
coming in on a promise, but somehow
always circling the point.

Taconic streams swollen by the melting mountains
push impatiently against matted leaves and fallen
branches that seem to belong somewhere else.

Nightfall is a gentle rustling on the forest floor
and the piercing laughter of predators that slip through 
shadows and edge along the lake where moonlight descends.

One day, April is icy, grasping and resolute.
Another time, the impudent, golden reach of forsythia
arches against the likelihood across gunmetal gray skies.

April ice can slip in unexpectedly with the sinking sun
to swallow tender sprouts like a crusty tumor.
Ice lays waste to fragile shoots on old wood.

In the end, the ice in April is every bit as fragile
as those new buds setting out a plan for summer. These 
gnarled bones of birches have lasted another winter.

Lines In Late April was originally published in Rattle