April
The morning sky is clouding up and what is that tree, dressed up in white? The fruit tree, French pear. Sulphur- yellow bees stud the forsythia canes leaning down into the transfer across the park. And trees in skimpy flower bud suggest the uses of paint thinner, so fine the net they cast upon the wind. Cross-pollination is the order of the fragrant day. That was yesterday: today is May, not April and the magnolias open their goblets up and an unseen precipitation fills them. A gray day in May.
From Other Flowers by James Schuyler. Copyright © 2010 by James Schuyler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux . All rights reserved.