Ritual of Mays

Observe the strange camaraderie
of Labrador and Bumblebee.
As hours sink to deeper hours
Lab watches Bee; Bee flies to flowers.
Lab lunges to Bee's buzzing tune
which drifts about the afternoon.
Bee, ignorant of hopeless flight;
Lab, who snaps at bugs that bite
together pass fair weather days
in timeless ritual of Mays.

Brashness of Spring

Though Winter be a time to rest from joy,
in mute solemnity of contemplative color,
Always the brashness of blossoms
bursts more startling than Spring's
attendant lightnings. Who could withstand
a constant Spring--what heart
could continue to beat in ongoing
amazement at the feats of Hue?
When the green of grass is cut more keenly
than any emerald, and the sky mimics opal
with ever-changing fires, when only
the shaded Yellow Trout Lily and Common Violet
bow their heads, and the only modesty
is in the shy shades of forested Anemones,
still wary of Frost, whose heart can sustain
such exuberance?What ears could
withstand a never-ending triumph of birds?
Celebration, ever pealed by night-belling frogs and day-
reveling wrens must exhaust even the Sun-facing
hemisphere of Earth in the nearest swing of
her ellipse, and yet
and yet
when such cacophonous life exudes
do we not all try to pause? to breathe it in
and hold it through the long sigh of Summer
before the slow fall of leaves calls our thoughts
down from treetops to the solemnity
of Winter's rest again?

Spring's Ephemeral First Love of Bees

I picture kimonos-
poor silk-screened copies
of April's blossoming cherry tree.
These romantic garments
still less delicate than
Spring's ephemeral
first love of bees.

Heron

The Great Blue Heron arches like a low flying comet
but sentient, able to stall, a living parachute,
touching down with grace normally attributed to swans
on the impossible runway of hills cradling his watering place.

If I could, I would be a heron. Who else
is an angel, a glider,
an arrow, a descending leaf,
a steady tree, water-rooted cattail,
spear fisher, all of these
and none? Who is the color of
distant storm-clouds and gravity
but so fiercely serene, so
defiantly light?

Deceit

The daffodils, deceived, lie drifted,
their outrage muted by the snow,
thick with cunning silence falling.
The romance of green Spring forestalling,
with frigid kiss ere it can grow.

Ides of March

In-blowing-storm-grayed distant hills...
Leaflorn last-of-winter frayed trees...
All caught between are promised deep bone chills
by winds too fraught with rage to be called a breeze.
Then pecking rain far colder than the winter's snows
and in the looming oak, a murder of crows.

Diver

At the cliff's edge,
I prepare my dive.
Behind my shoulder, a voice says,
Wait. There's no
ocean there, below.
That's an abyss.