NATIONAL POETRY MONTH ENDS WITH A BANG, NOT A WHIMPER

With Poetry month coming to its final days, I wanted to give it a coda of my own. This is a poem I wrote no doubt when I was out on the pavement, hustling for a job. I should not have been so boisterously joyful but I was.

Spring elicits from us moments of absurd and irrepressible exuberance, which may be why we’re fond of it. I rarely give in to such happy abandon. It seems like alchemy and I mistrust it. However, on this late spring afternoon I was suffused with the spontaneous spirit of ee Cummings. 

Cummings is a poet who doesn’t seem to receive much respect today. In the pantheon of American versifiers, he may occupy a spot somewhere between William Carlos Williams and Ogden Nash. Yet no other poet but Cummings ever wrote poems that are the verbal equivalents of handsprings and somersaults.

With spring in my heart and Cummings’s in mind, I’m clicking my heels and hoisting my arms to the sky.

 THE RIGHT ADDRESS

On Broadway @ 23rd

I swing an empty bag

@ cruising buses—

There’s a value

To being absurd.

The streets are mine

Between three and five,

& when a cool breeze blows

I make the flowering trees

My own

& fill my head

With conquest schemes,

Believing my deliveries

Are overnight transcendent;

All destined for success.

@ Madison Park in early spring,

When the sun makes an exit,

It tosses gold at the stone walls,

Like a wishing fountain,

I feel bold.

It’s one more first,

No traumatic memories

To rehearse, no regrets,

Poor choices, bad luck,

Wastes of time, or ancient

Curses to reimburse.

Again for a renegade second,

I’m free, history loses track &

Hold of me: in the bubble

Of a blessed mood

That sprang into being

Like green velvet on

The reawakened trees,

& for no apparent

Reason, I believe

Each message

Will be delivered to

The right address.