Come down spring and greet us with tulips,
with snowdrops, with crocus and iris.
Come down little moonflowers
crowing open in the middle night.
Come down spring with itchy eyes
and flat vocabulary, with holidays
of rebirth and fecundity, of miraculous
blood-smeared evasions of the angel
of death. Come down spring
like a slender moon sunk into the great
Pacific Ocean. Its volcanoes erupt
shiny lava to form a chain of islands.
Come down spring to these islands.
Fly your migrating birds over them,
to defecate seeds, to grow grasses
and trees. Come down spring
to this new paradise, as my heart
drained of blood, bone white,
sliced and splayed open, the left
ventricle a lagoon full of lotus flowers,
the valves four rocky alcoves,
and in the softest place, the wall
in the middle of my heart, a swamp
of lily pads. On the slickest pad
a first frog croaks a song
to summon a mate who doesn’t appear,
croaks a song to summon the clouds
who will rain and bring spring to the island.
–
Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections Ringer (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Between the Crackups (Salt). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and other venues. She is the founding editor of Couplet Poetry.