Green Orgasm

Again in the eastern woodlands
the miracle begins. What we
feared was locked forever

inside snow and isolation moves
imperceptibly together. As if
from the dead, passion rises

with the blood of maples and we,
brave as spring stars and old
trees, abandon the safety

of distances. We cast off
blankets piled against the graveyard
chill, cast off cottons, cast off

wool that sealed frail hopes
from one another’s hands. Almost
despaired of, the sap lifts on great

pulleys of sunlight, spilling into
buckets, mating with honey-tongued
fire, roiling and boiling into this

sweetest of sugars. Laud the green
of new-mottled lizards, praise
this pistachio air, rejoice

with white waters leaping
over the precipice of bone.
Greet with solemn joy

the small, speckled emerald
of the warbler’s egg, the music
of fiddlehead ferns as every

where the evergreen of mercy’s
season kisses us awake and every
thing shudders into now. Now.

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