so silent odalisque.  long empty pie pieces sliced by solar time: solstice to equinox to solstice to equinox.  a big sun-cross with silent sweeps in between.  every circle is a year.

this silent sweep is avril, the cruelest month, eliot said.  plants don’t want to be buried they pull themselves, pale, embryonic un-dead, out of the earth.  marsh goes from gold to green again, the water is not summer blue or winter black but a sheeny-silver murk, faintly pink.   my room is cold then perfect perfect warm then hot then cold again in just one day as the sun slips in and out of window frame.  birds build nests of straw and trash.  i leave shreds of scrapbook paper on the sill for them to take.  scrapbook shreds pad nests.

now is not a time i want to eat eggs.

i want to eat…green shoots as they curl out of the ground.  big bowls, before they toughen too much in the sun.  how crisp and fresh these young sprouts.   they snap between teeth,  taste of minerals, essence of dirt firmed in cellulose and sweetened with chemystred  light  .  radish asparagus lotus root  fiddle-head fern.  young and crisply fibrous.

i am no spring sprout.  i am a fruit not yet fermented to wine, but late-season, heavy and odorous.

i plump myself on fresh spring greens.  the birds pile them on the sill.  maybe in exchange for the nesting material, or maybe just because they  like to feed me.  because they care.

–The Odalisque