City Spring

Ruthlessly awakening, a New York Spring
is not about the pretty or the sweet –
nothing in this city panders. Sidewalks,
streets provide indifferent concrete
frames and bands Manhattan’s scrabbling
mad vertiginously budding bushes, branches
need to bibble, bubble, cram into
and in-between: squiggly green stuff

grasps and gasps off curbs and cul-de-sacs
and V-shaped parks that pockmark scree
and pile and drain and block and brick:
sickly – thickly – toiling in the meager soil –
unreasonably pushing and resisting
and insisting on its dumb unanswered song
and say. Downstairs, all day, an aged half-blind
cocker spaniel sits up, tense, erect, behind

the bars of his bleak sentry window, barks
unceasingly at sudden shifts and pops
and sparks of light, the vague bright
sun-punched sight of breeze-whipped creatures,
buses, taxis moving, heaving, leaving,
blaring, glaring: insurrections daring to verge
into view – repetitiously suspicious
of another endless resurrection of the new.

.