While winter’s last bloom graced flower and tree, the cardinals in my yard kept singing their song of Spring.

The coyotes kept to their usual path, shortly after dawn.

The doves found the seed I put out for all comers.

And I found this poem… 

Spring Snow

By Linda Gregerson

A kind of counter-
blossoming, diversionary, 

doomed, and like
the needle with its drop 

of blood a little
too transparently in 

love with doom, takes
issue with the season: Not 

(the serviceberry bright
with explanation) not 

(the redbud unspooling
its silks) I know I’ve read 

the book but not (the lilac,
the larch) quite yet, I still 

have one more card to
play. Behold 

a six-hour wonder: six
new inches bedecking the 

railing, the bench, the top
of the circular table like 

a risen cake. The saplings
made (who little thought 

what beauty weighs) to bow
before their elders. 

The moment bears more
than the usual signs of its own 

demise, but isn’t that
the bravery? Built 

on nothing but the self-
same knots of air 

and ice…

 

For the rest of the poem, click here.

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From PoetryFoundation.org:

Linda Gregerson earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from Northwestern University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from Stanford University. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014, The Selvage (2012), Waterborne (2002), and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996). A Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor, and a devotee of the sciences, Gregerson produces lyrical poems informed by her expansive reading that are inquisitive, unflinching, and tender. Tracing the connections she finds between science and poetry, Gregerson says, “I think there are rhythms of thought, fragile propositions about the intersections of human understanding and human habitus, robust intersections of the pragmatic and the sublime, that science shares with art, and I love the thought that poetry can learn from and do homage to its near cousins.”

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Gregerson’s new collection of poetry will be published on March 22nd…

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Pepper and Poems

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