"We catch our breath and wait."

a prose poem for spring

“Unseasonably” appears in my book Decades: Selected Poems, but I recently made a few small edits to the piece and thought to share it again. Because ‘tis the season.

—JM

Unseasonably

i.

Spring coming in now, in the light, in the scintillated edges when it touches a thing, and returns things—say, the dormant globe thistle, rows of faded gravestones, the ragged sparrow perched on a chain-link fence—to their names. We catch our breath and wait. Tomorrow, snow.

ii.

The delirium of spring: colors emerging, margins blurred. Wind spinning bright shackles over the pond before dispersing into a warped reflection of the sky. In this weather, I walk a half-step beyond my body. In this weather, I practice death. Pale, carbonated light, within which all things from a distance appear to levitate.

iii.

April’s unrecognizable. Each breeze a husk of summer’s bloodlessness. Insects the size of a fist. No, the heart can’t catch up, torn into sepia grief. Every wild and nameless thing mindlessly reaching. I look for you in the blur — a face to anchor my mind in the real.

iv.

Some color returns. Incandescent green horizon. Listen to frogs trill deep in the brush, and know it is spring. A flowering pear tree flickers white through a ragged curtain of rain. A swallow cuts against the current and vanishes. This is the sacrament of the present moment. Time passes through the body and leaves a poem on the tongue.