Jody's Notes
Soon this poem will need footnotes. To explain what snow is. Spring. Seasons. Stuff like that.
Which is worse? An endless cycle. Or a cycle that finally ends in a static landscape. How do you answer a question like that? (Why should the cosmos be a place where a question like that has to be posed?)
I republished the poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
Spring yet again: broken
promises made. The season’s budget
squeezing time from a stone:
lichens springing up as if
a future. Only the word’s
sinewy grasp gives this
meaning: makes punctuated
hope something pleasant,
something we bear
over and over again, like
new buds without memory:
no recollection of how
the yawn of fall
punctures our triumph,
omens the ringing slay bell,
the dead white
we’ll soon be covered in.
© 1996, 2001 Jody Azzouni