Raining Towards Aries

They come in ten-ton dump trucks, blunt State employees,

their

heavy-duty multi-plies digging eight-inch gullies in the

sand.

Bullies, they haul junk rock to extend the jetty; and I wake

to blue sheets and Old Lyme raining towards Aries. This

will make seven years of returning to watch each morning

the March stars soak the soft ground to daffodils. Invincible

cigars in their fingers, they bite lemon buns and suck

regulars in the shelter of their slickers and truck cabs:

a yellow convoy patrolling the shore roads for pay,

though

it's Twin Fish at the ocean, preceding the Ram, the

pounding sign

and beginning of the stars's cycle over the Connecticut

and glimmering

Sound-Weeks when hefty deer swim to Fisher's Island

to breed.

But tonight, their gang will roam the night streets of

Niantic's

jukeboxes and dying lobsters, buy beers and Special pizzas

in the seafood diners, humming chrome to ropes and

broken piers.

I sang here. I tried my first lines in the swirls of the tides

and river currents, bringing new heroes to Orion's band

until Ithaca

gleamed in the stallion sky and I believed I was arriving

each spring.

And tomorrow, they'll roar their coral Buicks to the Yard

for seven: the Turnpike's slanted median strips to clear

and more

maintenance on the engines-To chauffeur Persephone to

the planting.

What?

But she knows all the ruses and legends we try, she grins

in the ceiling's fields, will crush the shells in her hard

bare feet.