Poem 50: Spring Comes to the Candle Store

Tomorrow, it will be April, I said to the woman greeting us on our way into the store. Have we been here before? Oh yes, this is our indoor playground. Baseball hat, my two-year-old son said to me, back inside our front door, getting ready to go. Opening day. The flagship candle store is all animatronic singers, gunnite cobblestone floors, and twinkling lights on the ceiling. Today the soap bubbles blown down in the Bavarian evergreen grove are strangely comforting: at least here, the snow is fake and we can pretend winter is quaint. We change diapers, we meet Mommy, we stand on the bistro tables and watch the indoor fountain. It's spring, so I'm thinking of opera and frolic. Of Hart Crane in an apple orchard, drinking hard cider and listening to jazz records. As we walked past the towers of beach scented candles, Tone Loc rapped "you can be my queen, if you know what I mean, if you let me do the wild thing" over the store speakers. We buy nothing. We brought our own snacks. On the way out, the man at the door said, At least it's not snowing here. My son and I paused under the eave -- he was picking up rocks to throw onto the deck -- so I could point out the little green shoots poking out from the soil beds. Look, I said. We are almost there.

Poem 46: Two Haiku

Though there was a line

We stepped into the bulb room

Hit by the scent: spring

The pond still frozen

Despite the balmy March sun

It held as they kissed

Poem 42: O Forsythia

O, forsythia, all through my need for you
that is to say March, that is to say decades
All the gray days in my gray house, the gray
days of my dry youth. At the hardware store,
they said I couldn't kill you. They said,
You'll have to fight this one back.
And here you are, a smack of yellow
across my face. Can I confess, I've wanted
to bury my face in your petticoats,
I've wanted to prowl the streets
muttering about rivers, about melting.
I've always loved the river, even when
it was low and you could see the ribs
of rock. That brick gatehouse, diverting
water for the canal. O forsythia,
it's Spring and they're coming to take
away my bloom. How I find myself
staring at the fervid buds of the Magnolia,
even my pink rhododendron. Crocus hips,
tulips, all that reaches out of the earth
to bloom. Forsythia, when they take it
will you be there? Forsythia, will you tell me
you'll still burn yellow for my sake?