Outdoors, optimistic for early spring

Taking a minute, breathing in the soft light of 3 o'clock.
I sat outside, pretending that March was May
reading a book of poems by a poet from my home state,
someone who has seen what I have seen
grown where I have grown
felt, been, swam, shouted, leaped where I have leaped.
I am cold, but it is a surface cold.
My body's spring has a swelling warmth that I feel even in the ends of my limbs,
the tips of quivering branches waiting, waiting for the split and push
of the buds of young, ready green-growth.

Beach day

Gulls prod the sand with their strong banana-yellow bills
searching for clams to grapple in their beaks and clamber into the air with.
Letting drop over and over on dark rocks or the blunt sidewalk
the birds coax the shy clams into gently loosening their psuedopod grips that hold shell edge to shell edge
in a tight, oceany heart.
Opened, alive and quiveringin their briny soup
the clams find daylight and the sharp pierce, then tear of erratic gull beaks.
Flesh from the sea to flesh on wing,
soggy clams packed in feathered bellies like wet clay.
Gulls circling and squawking above the quiet beach, through the quiet day.

Reading

I've heard that the only people who read poetry are those who write it.
I thought, untrue! untrue!
I remember many years of sitting with a finger tracing along lines
taping poems to my bedroom wall
long before I looked lustily at a pen.
Two days ago, burrowing through my pages and notebooks
I came across many lines
written in my own hand—writing that looked familiar but felt far,
from another:
all of us, we are poets, in our minds, our hearts, our thoughts.
If living and seeing every day is no poem, what is?
What is?
I suppose reading a poem is writing a poem.
Poetry is moments, life is...moments.

Ambrosia

My dreams, of late, have become simple and ambiguous.
I dream of being warm and happy.
I dream of paying the bills a little easier.
These days, I need simple things to dream about,
to be able to turn them over in my mind and know them.
I love plums, for example. And even though right now
they are coming from Mexico or farther away, even though
they have drug a comet tail of semi trucks and diesel exhaust to get here,
this week there are plums at the store,
plums like soft warm lips of lovers
plums like little beating hearts
plums like luscious ambrosia handed down in bushel baskets from the clouds.
Bright, huddled pyramids of plums with soft, sweet bruises from gentle handling
swaying, rocking over roads in wooden crates
full of the juice of foreign spring.