May

Goose shit and babies, weddings
and asparagus, so much green,
so much flowering and shearing
in this season, your body hardly belongs
to you. It is pink. Damp. Up to your knees
in sweat and tomatoes, rummaging
your hands through the dirt,
testing its softness, how it might receive
what you might press in. Radishes, say.
Something bitter that can be coaxed
into loveliness with butter,
lots of salt. Does anyone
miss their sweaters? The wind
making a new face of your face?
I do. Don’t tell. I flinch
in the light of renewal.
Would that the world would let me grow
alone, would that the season could be
reduced to the duration of an apricot.

I esteem that fruit’s coy arrival,
its rusty sugar, wildflowers
and bark, rustling the tongue
like a mouthful of monarchs, like a fistful
of marigold petals and the gusts
that wrested them loose. How little
an apricot cares for my affection. Held
too eagerly: collapse. Even if
I am measured in my devouring, all too fast
the pit. Rough and furrowed,
like old teeth, why can’t
I trust what can be kept? I lap up
the juice left in my palm,
throw away the stone.