The Crazy Dog Lady Recognizes Spring and is Momentarily Buoyed by a Joy She Had Wholly Forgotten
       

The dogwood bracts horizontal on their boughs The iris still in its papers The dog lady's eyes are opened to what's bright but her skin is thinning & pale She'd like to shed that nervous-making sac of too-soft body It makes her think too much She'd like to be part of that purple-leafed tree—what is its name?—or of the dogwoods or the dogs whose limbs are limber & dogleg quick She believes she's the pulse of the ruined rowboat she passed at the highway's edge tipped on its homely black & white side Its keel exposed to the world O who might have left it adrift like that Listing when the trucks roll by O the one eighteen-wheeler the color of night's blue sky with its cab the starry green of a sea beneath foam Trophytaker Daylilies Hemerocallis Flowering quick-lived stars The most beautiful truck on the road & she the humorless old thing aware of her worth which is nothing But there's the lilac espaliered tumescent & there the bright bad taste of plastic flamingos in steel-legged flocks There're the dogs so busy in the new-greened grass following sweet trails of woodchuck & vole Their big simple hearts just now made of new bliss & the weeping cherry leaving the lady to weep

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Copyright © 2020 Renée Ashley All rights reserved
from Ruined Traveler
Otis Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission