Tag Archives: Seasons

Coot-Swallow, Everyone!

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Auguries require a due respect
to count for anything influencing deeds,
though reckoning backwards helps, as you’d expect,
convince us they relate to human needs.

To name the day for the first birds you see
is smarter than to study economics,
enough to recommend, it seems to me,
it over college, reading Sunday comics,

consulting stars, or running phrases on.
Exceeding science, it comes near religion.
I have a portent I can base this on,
my horse came in a winner on Crow-Pigeon.

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Coot-Swallow, everyone!
It’s a glorious spring day here. A coot-swallow day, to name the day after the first two birds I saw after going outside this morning. I had provisionally thought today was Dove-Weathervane, but looking out the window does not count.

Tolls

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The clock I race retires its ticks sometimes,
till I can only trace its whirring hands;
or it hides its face from even me, and climbs
up to the sun to dial foreign lands
which pirouette in answer to its ring.
How can there be so much I just now see?
More belles to ring, their beaux who bring
them wan I Ching: Blind cats that sing
and roosters wring. Fat flounders fling
their flukes to cling onto the Ming
vase that goes ping. Large turkey wing
tied down with string. Loose words that zing.
Post-shaving sting. I’m in the swing.
Rewind the spring. God save the King.
Rewind the spring. Spring. Spring. Spring. Spring.

April’s Flowers

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If I knew all the colours’ names
I would not know enough
to catalogue the tulip’s flames
in these fields lined with rough
wet grasses where the great swans feed
and grebes give grebe chicks rides
through waterways that squarely lead
to dikes that damp the tides.

For miles and miles the tulips grow
in every shade then some:
lavender, and furnace glow;
purest black, and plum.
Reds so hard they hurt your eyes,
greens as pale as smiles
exchanged by lawyers, blues like skies
and golds that gleam like piles

of museum treasures in the sun
that recalls tulips when they’re done.

March Sunday

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This garden hedge can stare me down with ease.
It has more eyes, perhaps a million more
from thrush to spider and on down to spore.
They gaze at me relentlessly and seize
the thoughts that I would concentrate on you.
Each takes a bit and laughs at it until
the birds fly off and spring’s first wasps go still.
I’d write an ode but find I’m laughing too.

Winter Walkies

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The wind less dark than coal tar still sufficed
by jiggery-pokery to keep us in the dark.

It scrambled clouds and ringed the moon with ice,
eclipsed it with the world. No solar spark

traversed Earth’s molten core to light the ring
of atmospheric ice around the moon.

The walk home in the dark was twice as frightening
as we had dreaded all the afternoon.

You walked ahead and waved to keep your torch
alight and upright so we’d not get lost.

I saw the large dog pad down from the porch.
Your light blew out precisely when you crossed

your arms to shield your throat as I had dreamed
you would, and since you could not then, I screamed.

An Autumn Urban Stroll, Amsterdam

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October blows brown leaves down. We are shopping.
We stock up on candles, ask about a chair.
Damp chilly breezes keep the strollers hopping
and no one’s sitting outside anywhere.
The headlines — seaborne plastic, radiation,
people fleeing warring powers everywhere —
are far away but never far enough.
On the next street we dodge past a prancing jester.
His coloured stockings, cap, and rubber ears
seem sensible in contrast to world news.
You’d think somehow a moral must be drawn
but I can’t find one though I’ve shopped since dawn.