I wouldn’t choose to be sitting inside
this Sunday afternoon either, on the first day
of real spring. Thinking a few poems would do me
more good than shoveling the last mounds of snow
next to the opera house into a wheelbarrow. A scene
I saw walking around Randolph before the reading.
This place the arts committee named PoemTown
for April’s national poetry month. Inviting citizens
from around our state to submit a poem that could fit
into a window, a driver filling her tank could read.
A teenager trying to buy cigarettes could hesitate,
before going into the convenience store, pondering
what that last line meant. Forgetting the law he was
trying to break. I wish I had more time to read all one
hundred and eight of them. So many windows,
so little time is the title of the poem taped in Aubuchon’s
tinted window. Inside, the shovels and rakes selling faster
than pancakes. I’d be amiss to call anything else.
Here where the sap is flowing and driving over Bethel
Mountain I saw the beginning of flowers splitting
rocks without hesitating, that wouldn’t be caught dead
inside, to adorn a poetry reading.