Okay, this is fall, but whatever.

Touch Me
by Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

I love the poems you guys posted, taught the cummings one. One certain verse of Frost's Two Tramps in Mudtime does Spring for me.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over a sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

Thanks, Penny. I'd forgotten that one!

Spring has sprung
The grass has riz,
I wonder where
the birdies iz?

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon my inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude:
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils



William Wordsworth

Of New England Springs

The leaves are budding
So fresh and green
On trees that come to life in spring
Thin blades of grass once covered with snow
Come stretching upward from the ground below
Pastel colors on flowers so bright
Seem to fill with neon on quiet moonlit nights
And people who mingle in parks on benches
Bring not a care from their homes
Surrounded by fences
Nothing on these days can really offend
As cold winter frowns become smiles
Once again
Embracing the beauty even fall is known to share
After summer drops its moisture
From the thick and humid air
Of New England

Lawrence S. Pertillar

From Grade I but etched in my memories:

"Listen" said the pussywillow,
"I can hear a brook!
Spring is coming! Spring is coming!
Let's go out and look."

PM me your phone number and I'll sing it to you. What stupid things I remember.

(featured in last month's O magazine)

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own dorr, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

- Derek Walcott