Cheryl Snell
Summer 2009
Poem with Spring Fever
If the dark weighs you down
and you’re covered with peat
you might be a plant. To make sure
this is not a metaphor, attend to
what’s winding around
your southernmost tip. Loosen
your entanglements. Sharp-toothed
animals are good for this. Otherwise,
spin the situation, take comfort
in your sturdy foundations. They might
last forever, despite the fiction
of biodegradables. Sooner or later
your head is bound to swell, the green
bursting through to where the sun
pulled the sky close against winter,
and it will open you like a canopy.
It will announce your name to the world.
Neither Here nor There
We were always on the way to someplace else.
Like that time we ate up the road
to Pittsburgh, spitting out exhausted miles,
bickering over every toll.
Don’t look back, you told me, I’d hate to lose you---
as if we’d hadn’t fought all night for each other,
our language a tangle of stop signs
and danger crossings.
By the time we arrived at the wrong church
for someone else’s I Do’s, we’d decided
to make the best of it. We toasted
to the road’s blind spot
and serenaded the newlyweds with a song
we’d made up along the way.
We didn’t mean one word of it.
We counted the verses out like change.
