This week’s poem describes a particular kind of spring scene – one I would guess has never appeared in a poem before this one.

This poem appeared originally in “3 Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian & New England Writers,” which was edited by Valerie Lawson and won a 2018 Maine Literary Award.

A former associate editor of Art in America, Carl Little has written extensively about art, particularly New England artists. He lives in Somesville, and his most recent poetry collection is “Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems” (Deerbrook Editions, 2006).

 Spring Pick-up

By Carl Little

Dozens of mattresses line the road,

neighbors tossing beds as if

the hotel bedbug blight

had reached down east.

 

Some are stacked like the princess

and the pea while others float

like rafts on brown shoulders, taking in

the rain and, yes, it’s Maine,

 

a coating of snow, which

makes you shiver, whose dreams

shift to Arctic places whenever

your wife pulls the comforter away

 

in her troubled sleep.

Miserable things, not the body count

your mother called streetside bags

of garbage in the city, more morose

 

than that, unfit for making love,

for even meanest slumber unless you’re

homeless and exploring Somesville

in April, in which case

 

you can’t believe your luck, a bed

every hundred yards or so

buttressing the cold road

awaiting the blissful collapse

 

of your worn and wandering body.

 

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Carl Little. It appeared originally in “3 Nations Anthology” (Resolute Bear Press, 2017) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

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