EARLY SPRING

“Don't turn around, your gypsy heart”

U2

It started on the coldest of days, walking back in the

wind and snow, shivering and

face-chapped after a day buried in the dull stacks that smelt

of Dewey and Veblen

and Hemingway, penciled notes scribbled in the margins,

witnesses from a time

of meaning, when there was a purpose, not like now when we

agree not to think hard

anymore, it was all behavior, and so walking in

the snow it seemed so cold

when that maroon Buick appeared from the flurries and you

stormed out in a t-shirt, 


bare arms hugging yourself, you trudged off into the flurries 
and I was afraid, 
so much passion in such bitter cold, scorched by your hot

syllables exploding

the air, I tried to offer you my snorkel coat but you’d

disappeared in snow, a ghost.

Come Spring when all the ballyhoos of forsythia burned

their glaring yellow in

yards of mud my cat Henry prowled the grass tracing the Spring

and found it in your house,

he wandered through the open door and curled asleep on your bed.

You invited me in

to retrieve him, this ruminant philosopher, this skinny

black Lothario, this

bundle of behaviors, this stimulus-response machine,

there we stood, you in your

overalls skirt, Henry in his finest black fur curled up

on your bed and me in

my St. Vincent de Paul finest thinking I dare not look so

I grabbed Henry and took off

only later to drop a letter in your box, a poem

I’d written right after

I’d locked the cat inside, it was a lark, something I was

sure you’d laugh at and scorn,

wad up and curse, I was happy to have sent it so I 
could return to the stacks

that smelt of old hay, to Emerson and Thoreau in that 
false spring, and knock my head

against sentences that taxed my frugal brain. When you wrote back 
my hands shivered,

I was reading about the oversoul, of all things, and 
just not buying it, it 


was the 70’s, there seemed to be something and nothing
at all there, all the 
Baba Ram Dass “Be Here Now” 
shit among dusty museum fetuses floating in 
flecked formaldehyde jars,

cold buoyant bundles of stimuli and response severed
from the world of feeling

and yet feeling and thought was everything, wasn’t it?, the 
poems and letters in our

mailboxes appearing every night, we saw Jr. Walker 
and the All-Stars play

“Shotgun” and when we walked home that night we were not lovers, 


we weren’t really talking 
except daring each other’s presence and when I reached
for your hand as we crossed 
the railroad tracks you pulled it back, but later that night,
sitting on the wicker sofa 
and reading the paper you pretended not to know me 
and yet there you were,

abstract and concrete, we slept on my mattress with the moon-

light on us, agreeing

to keep it decent but naked, like Emerson, you were

so lovely, so stoic

so smart and so real, and your gypsy heart, your itinerant

fortune-telling heart, turning

and turning as you danced, I could not face you, or myself,

that Spring, without fear, without

tiring of Thoreau living in his shack, without feeling

what I felt, spelled by a

gypsy and a cat, each evening returning to that

mailbox praying there’d be          

another letter answering my poems, hoping there’d be

no letter, not tonight,

I could feel your heart turning and turning, this time in my

chest, and how one dances

with that, so suddenly alone and feeling, alive.