Poetry
April
is national poetry month
I spend it recovering from surgery
accomplishment measured not in metaphor or meter
but in tubes removed from their beds of flesh
At the huge hospital door, I am released
a nonnative butterfly at a spring wedding
the huge world flutters gales against
what I hope will soon be scars
Home, on my porch, I try to read Cavafy,
Piercy, Rich, Rilke, or even Plath,
but the white spaces on the pages
absorb all my diluted attention
So I turn to the catalogs accumulated in my absence
the models mapped with this season’s swimsuits
look oddly unfinished-unbisected by incisions
no neat detours around the navel’s pothole
My yard seems wide as the Asian Steppes
mother of those wild tulips cultivated by the Dutch
great great grandmother to the single red cup
blooming from a bulb buried by someone I once knew
Someone who could strut, smooth-skinned, in a bikini,
someone whose wings could skirt the sun, someone
who read poems celebrating April’s cruelties, believing
herself strong enough to survive them, laughing
Ruthann Robson