the audacity of spring

in my purple crocus-dream,
you were spilling yarrow seeds from your wrinkled palms
while I gazed into a pool petal-deep of my own self,
another spring squandered.

I am still pulling dandelions from my teeth
when I wake, buried in the cloying scent of your aftershave.
memory unravels, stitch by stitch, in this sweater of a life I’m smothered in
and I hear the churning ground of grief, april rivers rising to swallow me.

now I suck sugar from the strands of our rhubarb years,
with a sourness that proclaims the season long past its equinox.
I gape at the audacity of spring:
to reappear without your eyes to beckon it!

for the greengreengreen of flurried leaflings
haunts me with the song of forgotten emeralds:

a sleeping grave hidden for each of us
amidst the drowsy murmurings of the clover.