Richard Epstein
Wednesday: Theme and Variations
Wednesday
Among these sparrows, frogs, and chickadees,
Finally warmed by sun instead of steam,
Too early for the shift to certainties,
Pentameter to prose, maybe I dream
Of sex and violets. Perhaps I know
What scientists on salary forecast:
This Thursday, patchy fog and early snow.
Their spring comes early, but it does not last
Forever. So I’m told. No season does
Which lies beneath the dirt today. Tomorrow
The violets will be the spring that was.
They lend me verse. Whatever else I borrow,
I offer back, as though I had a choice.
First day of spring, this is my winter voice.
Whensday
Dr Dee and his chicks, that brood who read
Fire and numbers, every comet signed,
What good are they? Their sun is not a head
Of state. Mere shape lives only in the mind,
In digs where violence dwells, sex of a kind,
Like ringing changes on these lilybells.
He knew his time, he told his time. And then?
I heard the answer. Like the heart, it tells
The count. It told the weather, but not when.
I take my time. It will be small and soon.
He only heard the pitch of notes that men
Are built to hear. I think I heard that tune
Performing here. The feeder and the grass
Bear the refrain: “A lass, my love, a lass.”
Wedsday
Nobody claimed that flowers are untrue
Because they claim their pollen from the wind.
Imagine being proffered that by you —
“It was the zephyr did it. I’m unskinned,
I’m virgin as a stone.” Of course you are.
The hyacinths immaculately flower.
They took their color from a passing star
While you were sleeping: some ungodly hour
When spring believed that nobody was watching.
Tulips push through. The grass begins to sweat.
Troo-loo the song the songbirds have been hatching.
Trust is a cycle. If we do the same,
We get it back. And no one knows its name.
Wendsday
A pilgrimage, spring having sprung, we go
The places we go every day, to see
What sun has done to change the world we know:
It starts from scratch, except for me and thee.
We are not what we have been, more and less,
Parts shed, augmented, by and large forgotten.
We still can flower — there is that, God bless —
So fertile we, so much to work with, rotten
Right to the corps. They call these zephyrs. Feel
Commotion in the ground? No? I don’t either.
From this point forward, nothing much is real —
No pilgrims, Aprill, smalle foweles neither.
Spring forward. Fall back. Either way, we stand
Right where we are, not sky, not wholly land.
Richard Epstein’s poems continue to appear in a miscellaneous assortment of little magazines and academic quarterlies in print and online, in the US, Australia, and the UK, including the inaugural Chimaera, an accomplishment which he may announce in lapidary form on his epitaph. More of his poems can be found at rhepoems.blogspot.com.
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