A few feet from the front step
once-loved crocus clumps
grimly aspirate color —
once daring, now a spastic folly.
Minister of the E.Evening
I hang upon your every inflection
hoping for unsought, perfect elegy
(I was to have been her composer of operas).
Minister of crocus thrustings,
time’s foully transient
acts of repetition —
you would ask words of me?
Her hair will not lengthen this spring.
Shards of April mythologies I excavate
she recants from the monotone of a Cochise County grave.
Desert to desert, season to endless season.
Minister, you have lain a dead poet’s beauty
mud-luscious at my feet,
asked that I minister
to you in Sprechstimme
but I am become like the crocus
whose color is wordless,
whose recitals of season
— all-instrumental, singerless — fail.
-Mark Underwood
