April 2024
Bio Note: I have published three full-length books of poetry: Crave from NYQ Books; Appetite for the Divine, winner of the McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; and Remorseless Loyalty, winner of the Snyder Prize, also from Ashland. I retired from Binghamton University in 2020 after decades of teaching there and acting as Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program. I am a current (and a founding) faculty member of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. My husband and I live on a farm in the Susquehanna River valley of upstate New York.
Author's Note: This poem grew out of a challenge, from the Academy of American Poets as I recall, to write a poem that used the words “April is the cruelest month” within it.
Bliss
April loves a challenge, choosing to split
the slab of winter-hardened earth with the
silk tongue of a crocus. She casts the stiffened
brooks as her fandango dancers. At first
they crack and groan, call her the cruelest of
taskmasters but April persists, persuades:
the streams ripple, sequined and agile. For
April even forgotten roadsides can
ruffle out in a froth of forsythia,
waving brash wands of membranous stars
that glitter like eternity, then float to
the ground, a wasted galaxy melting
into the land while this uterine
muscle of a month bears down, rousting
the fetuses each from their dark havens,
thrusting them naked and mewling into
the hungry light. The least of April’s exploits
is lulling us: we are so eager to
ignore the hollow echo of the daffodils’
blare and the lithe red tulips’ throats of snow.
Originally published in Natural Bridge, No. 13 (Spring 2005)
Finally Spring,
the night reverberant
with peeper song
and the scent of freshening fields.
The moon, in august
majesty, proceeds horizon
to horizon in slow
pavane with luminous
Jupiter: surely
this much we got
right: naming
the minute swath
of planets and stars
we’re able to discern
the heavens: how
indubitably we depend
upon those powers we have
yet to comprehend: our
dependency, its indifference,
numinous.
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