april, wherever we are

you become so aware of the trees
the flowers change daily hourly minute by minute even
and the woods have their own agenda

the foxes you know think of us plenty
we throw all our bones off the deck
all the old things sit

not long in the wild onions
before the foxes come mute
neighbours we know well

they spend the day coming and going
up and down the stream where we cannot
in a pandemic but we still eat

and they must find it rather strange
to find the courts and places and drives
not deserted by day as usual

but full of vigorous couples and children
on bicycles almost ceaselessly
almost as if we had only just noticed spring

for the first time in history and thinking
it solemn and wondrous cancelled all our normal plans
to focus great concentration

on the miracle.

bosman in olivet

flesh is grass and flesh is ash and all of it together
has been touched with the finger of death coming

at its own pace until the night of power this is none
of it news. but someone said it was lent now and i

thought about it for some time because it has been lent
for a while i replied where you have to do so much.

because it has been so hard to create anything beautiful
really to create anything since january. sometimes one

feels like the only thing alive as if it were just me and the
ice but the frogs and the dandelions have been raptured.

flesh is grass i repeat to myself and God is a shout in the
street and as i walked through olivet i thought does

anybody live in these buildings? i saw a man sleeping in a parked
buick and no one else and i thought to myself i have neither

grass nor a street. i am in olivet but i may
as well be at the bottom of the sea or on a far moon.

i am over olivet but not in it olivet and everything else the town
charlotte potterville and delta township strung out on

trenches of frozen blood grey as the night that we had
in january the last time it rained i am just vapor in them. really my whole time

here has been an exercise in vaporous wandering along roads
frozen in rictuses of knowing derision negating

the very cause of a road. i can still remember that
a road has to go somewhere but south of lansing

everything is called highway there is island highway and packard highway
and bellevue highway and kinsell and gresham and butterfield and nye

highways but
most of them are not even paved.

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