“Spring,” from the 26 May 2001 New Republic:

It would be
good to shrug
out of winter
as cicadas do:
look: a crisp
freestanding you
and you walking
off, soft as
new.

“Sonnet to Spring,” from Elephant Rocks (1996):

The brown, unpleasant,
aggressively ribbed and
unpliant leaves of the loquat,
shaped like bark canoes that
something squashed flat,
litter the spring cement.
A fat-cheeked whim of air—
a French vent or some similar affair—
with enough choices in the front yard
for a blossomy puff worthy of Fragonard,
instead expends its single breath
beneath one leathery leaf of loquat
which flops over and again lies flat.
Spring is frivolous like that.

“Spring,” from Flamingo Watching (1994):

Winter, like a set opinion,
Is routed. What gets it out?
The imposition of some external season
or some internal doubt?
I see the yellow maculations spread
across bleak hills of what I said
I’d always think; a stippling of white
upon the grey; a pink the shade
of what I said I’d never say.

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