The sixteenth day of May (a day late)

Assiniboine Forest, May 16, 2005.

Spring in Assiniboine Forest
this year
means everything green below
mossy urns teetering on bright stalks
no thicker than the orange stubble
that picks
its way across your chin
and green above
deer-lipped shoots swaying on black branches
still brittle from the bud-freeze-thaw
and the drowned
roots the rot below
means both of us tying woolens
around our waists kicking up enough
mud to weigh down our cuffs
and colour
the days

I was looking forward
to clutching your long cool fingers
as we walked through the balloon-rub chorus
of bull frogs from puddles and ditches
the heady amphibian lust
of last year
to crouching among the millions of mushrooms
both of us enveloped by the swell
of spores
on the fallen-log-sodden-mulch spawn
of the year before
but it seems
I must satisfy myself
with what there is
the glitter of everywhere wet
the pinpricks
of newly-hatched predators
humming the tune
of this year