Illustration by Blair Thornley

It's spring in northeast Ohio, where the year
is nine months of anticipation
followed by three months of disappointment.

April here is not the cruelest month,
just crueler than March.

We're the grayest place in the country,
every year battle Buffalo and win,
our SAD sadder than theirs, nanny nanny
boo-hoo.

The dogwoods try to bloom, but
would walk like Burnham Wood to Birmingham
if they could.

Once a preacher showed me
how their blossoms form
an Easter cross,
little daubs of blood
on the four limbs.

Yes, love is almost
in the air -- in virgins slogging
around a flaccid maypole, the scent
of lilacs gone looking for an ear
to dab behind, the ocher drift
of sooty pollen --

but so is parting, another sort
of beginning, I guess, like the weather today,
what the British, that dark and dripping race,
call mizzle, almost invisible, until you step
ankle deep into May's fecundity of mud,
and see the garnered drizzle dropping
tears from every bud.