patience

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;

call it bummery if you please;

I’ll call it patience;

I’ll call it joy, this,

my supine congress

with the newly yawning grass

and beetles chittering

in their offices

beneath me, as I

nearly drifting to dream

admire this so-called weed which,

if I guarded with teeth bared

my garden of all alien breeds,

if I was all knife and axe

and made a life of hacking would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning

these sort of phallic spires

ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms

which the new bees, being bees, heed;

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell

from the words my mind makes

of the world, and everything

makes me mildly or more

hungry—the worm turning

in the leaf mold; the pear blooms

howling forth their pungence

like a choir of wet-dreamed boys

hiking up their skirts; even

the neighbor cat’s shimmy

through the grin in the fence,

and the way this bee

before me after whispering

in my ear dips her head

into those dainty lips

not exactly like one entering a chapel

and friends

as if that wasn’t enough

blooms forth with her forehead dusted gold

like she has been licked

and so blessed

by the kind of God

to whom this poem is prayer.