Poem written while looking out the window into the backyard spring… If you are expecting a lyric expression of spring’s promise or an alliterative list of the quiet beauty I can see just looking out the second floor window and into the backyard, this poem will disappoint you. I am having a difficult time this spring moving my mind into a lyric frame and I do not see much promise in my backyard either, spring or otherwise. The plants are tired: the lilacs are played out, budding green, but there will be no violet announcements and the forsythias are tangled spindles, bare, pale yellow and the holly has been thinned by careless ash and the old pussy willow is good for furry buds, but only at the very tips of branch and the lawn is a dry beige, ripped occasionally into dark brown slashes by our baby shepherd and the irises are thick, but flowers few and I fear this will be the year I must cut down the pink rhododendron, the previous winter and last year’s dry summer have transformed in stages its rubbery leaves from deep green to yellow, now many curled brown, earth ready. The plastic picnic table and chairs are dingy, ready for the mold of spring, the grills are rusting and should have found their way into the garage for winter and my artistic plans for the plywood scraps that have been leaning against said garage remain unattained and the garage itself needs to be repaired in the least or razed and re-built. So this poem written while looking out the window into the spring’s backyard is not about promise or re-birth or beauty or any of the other bullshit attendant in poem’s about looking out a window and into the drizzling spring morning. It is about failure, which nags always, no matter the season. It is about withering which is as evident in spring, as it is in the other three. It is about the beauty becoming something other and having to twist it, turn it, cram it to still make it fit into the word beauty, the beauty of decline is an oxymoron, a literary trick. It is about your expectation as you pick up and begin reading a poem with the word spring in its title. It is also about blind belief in words on a page because even though I told you this poem would disappoint you, you kept expecting me to come to my senses and deliver myself from darkness, to admit I was full of shit and that spring is indeed about promise and re-birth. But that belief is contingent upon your believing I am looking out the window into the backyard spring, but I am not looking out window into spring’s backyard, I am sitting, rather uncomfortably I might add, on the floor, at the coffee table in my living room that looks not out into spring’s backyard, but into the recently swept street, the morning traffic, the usual routine and my legs have fallen asleep and I should get up to see what the dog is chewing on rather than continuing to type this poem and since I am coming clean here the rhododendron is not in the backyard at all it is in the front yard, I moved it for the sake of showing that death always exists alongside promise and I gave this poem the title it has because no one wants to read a poem entitled, “Poem written as I sit at the coffee table, kvetching, while my legs fall asleep and the dog chews on the piece of plastic that ten minutes ago was an eyeball attached to one of her stuffed toys…”