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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