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!
