Another Spring Poem

Scant animals with their glassy hoped-for eyes draw near to my crumbling step. I think they want to sing me something, carol a Mozart aria perhaps, but they cannot so they lift furry eyebrows shuffle as if to say, ‘we can’t, but listen to the wind in the cavities of our bones, it whistles both merry tunes and dirges, it echo’s the past and the present but all our four paws are here in the moment'. A jowly mouse with the face of a New Jersey cop edges closer than most. “We are not trying to warn you” it says, expressing its lack of words in the brisk modality of pigeon-toed dance steps. “We are not begging for food or love” It is Spring now and we are out here happy to have come through. We are a deputation, a clique, and a clack calling you out into the bare hedgerows. There are new threads and tubes driving upward from the twiggy earth --- --- you’re acting like a dead man and so we gather here to awaken those other little animals that nest in your fat and fiber. Lead them out soon or they will eat you and you will have deserved it - that is all.” I nodded respectfully at the red whiskered rodent. Leaving the door open a crack I went to the kitchen to chop the head off a dead chicken. It was time to eat and not be eaten. Spring is whisking its mush. A dry wine has aged fizzy and fine, it is already shaking it’s splashy bubbles ready for the sipping summer suns to come. The light outside these walls is porous, thus I will go I will go to the hedgerow, hang a winter scarecrow by its ankles until it coughs up, a new free range Spring poem worth the eating one with garlicy kisses, a round Romaine lettuce, with a lightly garnished piquant dressing.