Chocolate Milk

Glaring freezing February day
which several green shoots
in the scrubby garden
in the front allay
a bit: a blip on winter’s screen.
A sip of chocolate milk:
the glass of it you’ve conjured,
stirred is blissful in its way:

evokes a sheen
of memory, the just-before-
the-just-before-the-Spring
of childhood: when life came
seasonally in a sensate
jointed puppet show with thrust
and point. Chocolate milk for kids:
a hazy film skids oddly in the memory:

a sense of safety
you’d forgotten. There’d been
a mommy once, and daddy,
and an utter faith in future.
Those sutures have come loose –
and in the scrubby garden tulip-shoots
erupt indifferently: no operation
possible to give them

rationale. Chocolate milk becomes
an upfront kind of pal, best friend –
a stay against the end.
The ghosts of children play as light
bends through them, reaches you –
and here's another thing:
there’ll be tulips
in the garden in the Spring.

.