It's cold and windy and unspringlike in central Maine, which is pretty typical for early April but annually disheartening. Two and half hours down the road, in Portland, crocuses are blooming, daffodils are budding, but here the lake is still patchy with ice, road dirt spins in little tornadoes, and the gray breeze is raw and urgent. I haven't driven on any gravel roads yet this season, but most likely they're rutted and potholed and greasy with thaw. That's spring in this neck of the woods: raw wind plus mud. I have written a hundred poems about central Maine spring, and all of them are amazed by its pigheadedness.

As always before dawn, log trucks are roaring through town. A little snow is forecast. I am lying in bed thinking about words and the fact that I forgot my gloves at home. 

This is the poem my son wanted me to read at the statehouse:

Spring on the Ripley Road

 

Knick knack, paddywhack,

Ordering the sun, 

Learning planets sure is fun.

                        —Paul’s backseat song

 

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.

Pencil-thin, the naked maples cling to winter.

 

James complains,

“It’s orbiting, not ordering.”

 

Everything is an argument.

The salt-scarred car rockets through potholes,

hurtles over frostbitten swells of asphalt.

 

James explains, “The planets orbit the sun.

Everything lives in the universe.”

 

Sky blunders into trees.

A fox, back-lit, slips across the road

and vanishes into an ice-clogged culvert.

 

Paul shouts, “Even Jupiter? Even foxes?

Even grass? Even underwear?”

 

Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;

horses bow their searching, heavy heads.

The car dips and spins over the angry tar.

 

James complains, “I’m giving you facts.

Why are you so annoying?”

 

The town rises from its petty valley.

Crows, jeering, sail into the pines,

and the river tears at the dam.

 

Paul shouts, “Dirt lives in the universe!

I want to be annoying!”

 

Everywhere, mud.

Last autumn’s Marlboro packs,

faded and derelict, shimmer in the ditch.

 

James says,

“When you get an F in life

it’ll be your own fault.”

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]