Swell

Mid-March, on the daily AM drop-off

through a bunch of affluent side streets

between school and here

a refrigerated dairy produce truck

keeps catching almond and dogwood branches

so much that blossoms blizzard

the windscreen and moonroof

and I have to switch the wipers

to intermittent in its slipstream.

I scribble something along these lines

among the breakfast things and set it weeks to one side.

At first it doesn't seem worth the while,

to want to state simply that it was lovely,

that not every given is bleak or wrong

and some even are as gorgeous as they are elementary.

The kids come home on different buses

the same shade of forsythia.

We call my mother from the shore for Easter.

That poem with the truck and blossoms?

It gets bigger, hokier. I'm not bothered.

April's bright stretches, the mailman says, are swell.

Our local Y widens its opening hours a smidgen.

The clay courts opposite pock and shuffle.

I learn to swim.