It's not the March 'Sketch' (I'm late) but here, have a poem.

Birds

If you were a bird, I think you would be
among the small, light perchers,
fleet and wary-eyed, half-hidden in the brambles.
Perhaps here and there flashing a shock of immoderate color,
red or blue or yellow blazing from your back, your breast,
beneath your wing.
Quick little ache of unexpected beauty.

If I was a bird, I think I would like to be a duck.
Although I would always envy the osprey’s mad grace;
at home in shallow waters, dabbling my bill in soft mud
with the sun mottling sleek, oiled feathers.
The water cold and perfect and delicious all around me.

Ducks are happy.
Their deaths quick, their lives full of moving rivers
Brief explosions of flight and web-footed, dirty joy.
Leave me amongst the weeds and bugs and rushes
With songbirds flitting in the branches all around.

Walking the dogs in April

It's a beautiful time of year, with all the newness and green, the little flowers lifting their heads everywhere, that very specific taste the air has in spring. The trees are having sex all over the place, and the bigleaf maple out front dusts my truck and everything in the vicinity with enough golden pollen that, when I move the tarp off of the woodpile, it falls to fill my cupped palm with softness, to fill less tangible parts of me with delight. It's young. Full of promise and life and the threat of hope.

I am pretty wounded. It's hard to admit, and I don't talk about it much, but I suppose breakups aren't fun for anyone, and I accept that my healing process will be a long one. At least it feels like a healing process now. I find it so strange how heartbreak, something I always dismissed as a thoughtless metaphor of popular culture, is literal: an ache in the chest, the little ball of pain behind the shoulder that unfolds like a bloom when one acknowledges it.

I tend to be the kind of person who does not bond, or love, or whatever you want to call it easily; once given, change to a lesser degree of trust is yet slower and more difficult. But I'm still here, still breathing, still alive in this glorious and shivering newness of the year. Several scars the warier, I am nonetheless so full of gratitude for all of the blessings bestowed upon me by this green and living world, alive, humbled by her beauty, receptive. Life is short and unfair and full of pain. But it is spring, and the daffodils are blooming, even though they are brief.



( Canines, felines, Osbick bird, me getting a little better at slinging my DSLR )