As I reflect on the transition we are making from Spring to Summer, I think of how incredibly affected I am by the seasons.  In fact, the manuscript of poems I am revising now is organized through the natural cycles of day and night, the seasons, and aging.  Here are two poems which display that sensitivity to the seasons. 

The first celebrates Spring:

The Canopy

Recognize me unbudded,

in green-tinctured

powder puff pink:

a carnation’s crumple.

Skirts and lumen sink

into sweet-sway hills,

brightened grasses.

Spare trees swell

on the greenway’s

flattened escalator.

My eyes tighten, as the tongue

presses against the roof—

eyeing the sky in the dark

story

of the mouth—

which is smooth, fixed.

It unbolts.  It says.

~

Crushed skirts knit the canopy—

become a canopy and finely rise.

Birds exchange trees in a mellow harmony.

I am not so free—not free but swelling—

and I sing in exchange of trees.

And the next speaks to the fecundity of Summer:

Borderland

What will happen now—

what now in the tallow,

low-tapped blind light,

under the shaded

blinds, beyond the canopy

of one fevered tree?

What will stir this pool later

when it closes up still

blue and under sun?

Who is gnawing at your waters?

Setting his forked hands against you?

 

I wonder who it calls after

8 pm on weekdays.

Old women walk around it,

their dogs bark and shake their stuff.

Fenced out, they riff in licks, and bits

of chlorine, aching to bruise—but then—yield.

What are you?

A country.

Even if I’m not trying to write about the seasons or our natural world, these motifs wind their way into my work.  What are your organizing principles or recurring themes?  Are these themes intentional or natural forces in your writing?  I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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