After Reading Proust
I never could
bear to be inside
before, as right now,
with sunrise
like honey smeared
across the lawn,
in this room at my desk,
in May with the bluebells
and anemone flooding
the loamy swales;
with the lilacs
in full bloom
along the garden shed
almost promising
that I might,
in today’s sudden heat
after last night’s
soaking rain, stumble
on morels, just-
birthed
in the moss
under forest elms.
It’s still agony
at times
not to walk out
from this interior
shade,
into the moist
art of wildflowers,
and soft ricochet
of warblers
above a sweep
of river current;
though now, half-
way downstream
from when I began
this life, the river
of my body
has molded itself
into an eddy
from which more
often than not
I’m content
to peer out
at the same scene
from the same room,
as strangely enamored
as those first
bees I saw
four times yesterday
in the boulevard
grass (twice
in the morning
walking my daughter
to school and twice
in the afternoon
walking her home)—
that with so many other
sources of nectar
to choose from
instead
spent all day
mining
down
through
a shaft
the sweet
inside the dark
of a discarded
soda can.
—Dan Butterfass, Rochester, MN
