Spring Fever

Fever

Some light madness is born
in the cool flutter of waking April,
with a chemical shift
spread by its green-fingered touch.
The buds stand erect,
studding bare-skinned branches,
licked by the whispers of a tongue
bent on spreading fever.

A window is split wide to
allow the passage of revival,
a way to trap it inside so
that it may never again fall prey
to grey mornings and wintry, black sleep.
It fills the room, runs through the body,
infusing both with a counterfeit promise
of potency and perennial living.

From beyond the freshwater flap of curtains
come the shrieks of suburban cats,
sounding murderous and damaging,
as the squirrels burst with furious gossip.
A search for backyard carnage reveals
a marble-eyed couple who part
when they sense the intrusion;
the caterwauling stops and
they withdraw without emotion
but the squirrels persist with their cynical rambling.

Vengeance rolls in wicked dreams all winter
and rouses now, full of intention.
This is when the guns come out:
a thawed-out plan of action,
a warm itch in the trigger finger,
a deceptive resoluteness in the vernal air.

When I see the tulips break earth,
I wait with a cold, sick worry,
wanting for ways to relieve it.
I hack at the quilt of dirt over the garden,
lift the broken tree limbs from the ground floor
and think of places to bury them so
that the remains will not offend me:
I choose the songs of blissful robins
and push the outcries of madmen aside.

The Aquilegia vulgaris will bloom soon,
a bombardment of colour and serrated petals
to mark the garden at the edge of the lawn:
tiny, recurrent explosions in the distance
which seem to be moving closer.