Spring Crown

1: Daughter Spring

A green haze gathers
on distant trees—a shy start
to spring, emerging

in changed costume to
ripen before our eyes. She
is a child now, but

ages by days, her aim
experience. She recalls
nothing of last year,

nothing of knowing
or what she must give away
to grow. Summer waits,

the full life, its green
tempered by black.

2: Sunday Night

Tempered by black, blue
deepens into night. Search
for stars and you see

light cruising, airlines
drawn to illumination
on the ground, beacons

welcoming them home.
From our windows, city lights
erase distant suns,

leave us inspecting
skies for pilots to guide us.
The constellations

lose their eyes, faded
in the dusk’s glare.

3: On the Block

In dusk’s glare, children
squint into just lit streetlamps.
The angled light draws

second shapes, shadows
of other forms from other,
imagined places—

Soon their day will be
tangled in sleep, likenesses
twisted in dreams and

pretend. What child would
slumber without the promise
of another world?

Doors close, leaving day free to
return unnoticed.

4: Reinvocation

Return unnoticed,
a weed in a sidewalk plot,
a visitor who

materialized
only in new light. Return.
The morning papers,

lie on doorsteps like
fish caught in strange seas, their eyes
turned inside, and day

rises in our dreams.
We are pictures of ourselves,
redrawn and colored

another shade, another
green awakening.

5: The Nature of Change

Green awakening
and moving in morning air,
other colors seem

momentarily
inert. Would Heraclitis
see the fire of change

behind permanence?
He has been gone so long, and
we think our growth so

reliable—flames
made pilot lights. I watch earth’s
axis twist, bunching,

its rotation set
to reverse again.

6: The Change of Nature

To reverse again
requires courage, the sort of
spunk only trees have.

Their confidence is
stone ready to weather sun
and shadow, life and

growth. Winter and spring
in them, they stand like statues
we stumble between.

Outside, wind quiets.
The sky turns suddenly
gray, and no one

is speaking—a reverence
irresistible.

7: Daughter

Irresistible,
so my daughter says, this sun
to end winter, new

cycles returning.
I love the sense she sees in
everything, her joy

planting the days.
I wonder if it will last.
I want it to last.

Her laughter echoes—
I study her eyes, floating
over her smile, her

mind on a horizon where
a green haze gathers.