The merest touch of breeze or rain or passerby
in early June sets pitch pines off in green-gold
pollen spasms: old efficiencies of hazardous
excess, their clouds stain everything they touch,
and they touch everything: windowsills and dishpans,
every kind of tree or leaf; roofs and gutters, walkways,
paintings, sheets—all greened and gilded: spring’s profligate
last fling before the summer’s rest. Plenty of pitch pines
get defiled along the way. It’s profane. But only as
the green-gold library inside Siena’s Duomo is.
Tonight, I conjure up a late spring day.
The deck out back, suspended in the trees, is plush
with pollen fall, and through the slider’s mirror I can almost see
the mark we might have made when, young, we touched
by chance, flashed like tinder, and left the shape
of tangled, wingless angels edged in gold and green.
Guy Rotella taught modern and postmodern poetry at Northeastern University. He dodges pollen in Wellfleet.
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