3 Poems & 13 Photos by Keith Moul

Spring Purple

Crocuses shoot up
and I look for a way into myself.

The soil is mush,
still in the sun, too full
to suck down the last puddles,
and the wind will not help.

Over on the island, I walked
through dead brush, kicked
small rocks, and found no key
to my head lodged in the season.

That was winter.  That
was fat corpses of maple leaves
dying into the earth, hugging it
wet with love
while the air clung, a heavy cloak.

These flowers spring purple,
yellow and white.  These flowers
sweeten the ground, some tree,
a mountain, this sun.

I could eat these flowers.
At least they
would get into my head.

"Dogsoldier 3," "Five Poems," 1975, p.63.
Reprinted in Red Ochre Lit, March, 2012


Spring

strings attached

eleven boys
fly orange kites

no strings at all

robinsrobinsrob
insrobinsrobins

Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, August, 1972, p.236.


Spring, 2012

Forecasters predict deepening snow later tonight.
Spring by calendar, winter still by the cat’s full fur:
wet unreliability for which the season is known.

I recall so clearly a halcyon day forty-six years back
when we lay contentedly, luxuriating in sweet grass
of a Missouri spring, recommitting our pastoral love.

A force flushed us; thrust through unwrapping buds;
propelled puckish nuthatches to birthing tender chicks;
mixed dormant chemicals in us; urged caressing summer.

Rapt, we felt our mouths might suck the moistening blooms;
felt easeful body heat uncurling straight the sticky loops;
felt only pleasure, not heeding scratchings by blanched sod.

Winter winds re-encircled us, our exposed skin goose fleshed.
Privately I begged that Spring assure my love in its making,
that love’s spell not be sacrificed to planetary recalcitrance.

But, under blackening clouds, our desire did not retard the ice.
We pushed, winter smothered us, back and forth. We rode passion
until our ardor persevered and peevish winter assumed irrelevance.

TWO CITIES REV ACCEPTED 6/16/15 FOR APPEARANCE IN THEIR FEATURED WORKS BLOG August 2015

 

Bionote

Keith Moul is a poet of place, a photographer of the distinction light adds to place. Both his poems and photos are published widely. His photos are digital, striving for high contrast and saturation, which makes his vision colorful (or weak, requiring enhancement).

http://poemsphotosmoul.blogspot.com/