This year Spring unfurled like a delayed leaf
in excruciating slowness until it was certain
Summer truly had abdicated and would never
come to slather the crisp cool mornings with heat
and sweat and foam of impending cavernous oven.

The newness of this singular creation shyly refused
to make final entrance and enticed and teased at the edge
of the wings of the curtains of the day so that we could
but wait for whatever winter in its perversity might play out
again and again and again in encore after encore after encore
to a performance that hadn’t really managed to happen in the first place.

So the leaves folded in their pods and the flowers rolled about themselves
and the gorgeous growth still indistinguishable from whatever had already died
were there waiting for days of weeks of discovery and rapture and revelation
this long groaning process of love never ending and birth without progeny
which left one longer and longer more beautiful than imagined still holding on
to the last smidgen of morning frost and crisp Canadian air.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.