On the day of vernal equinox
erotic crocus press their blunt blooms
beyond rigid earth.
Hen's eggs mysteriously balance erect
upon their wide ends.
Spring spatters wedding rice petals
over rough, granular sand.
The noon wind turns, carries a sweet suggestion
of innocent alyssum's burgeoning musk.
II.
Imagine August using the wet blanket
of approaching bay fog
to smother a swollen dune's fire.
Five million poems describing wave spume and shore clefts
fail to convey Big Sur's echoed blow holes
or sea anemone gardens.
The week creaks forward on stiff Monday axles.
My poems ignore every rule about workday boundaries;
metaphor creeps across the tongue
like intrusive white stars of encroaching alyssum.
Before I know it, the elms are glazed by gold
and every peach branch shivers fragile red shrimp shells.
Along Cypress Cove, there are no neat calendar countdowns.
We measure winter's progress by creativity's crotchety sleep
and the death of lobelia.
Beneath frost-racked verbena,
spent alyssum are furtively seeding.
IV.
Drizzle instigates the tight pearls of new, white germination.
Full moons, platinum sun,
brightness lasers the announcement of April's return.
I tenderly transplant dream's volunteer symbols
into bare beds of a possible poem.
Within a week, alyssum has invaded every empty inch,
camouflaging rocky words with its flowery scent.
