(after reading James Wright: A Life in Poetry)

There is no sadness like today’s sadness – 
a spring day so achingly alive I want to break
out of my body. But somebody already said that.
I want to join the host of dandelions on the lawn.
Somebody almost said that too. Are we nothing
but reproductions? I want to join the fledgling
leaves on the maples, the last straggling catkins
on the birch limbs, the ravens rubbing their 
three toes in the sun-warm garden, the green   
beetles hauling pebbles over bluestone.
Enough already with description, some surly
yenta yells from a lower East Side tenement
window in my head. She doesn’t know a seed 
from a shiksa from a sonnet but she claims
some part of me, too. I think she uses the same          
nest as phoebes under the eaves that shit
on my crime-lights, necessary or unnecessary
because the nearest neighbors are miles off.
Minus a shotgun, a crime-light does the trick,
pushing back the margins of the ominous. And now,  
fear has crept in over the dandelions and ravens.    
My eyes are filled with light this morning and still 
darkness crowds the edges where rods conquer
cones. Or is it the other way? Knowledge dogs 
us, turns us out of the garden, over the biting-
fly pastures, and into the ticked-infested woods.
And on into the world where generations begat 
and beget and there is no ending, is there, except 
for something upending as elegy in which
we inherit no sadness like today’s sadness.