The world smells green & wet & today I
am in a postlapsarian good mood
as I meander by the Raritan canal,
no longer moving in a deadly torpor
like a winter fly, but thinking once again
(the warming weather) about sex in a good way,
how all those smells you’re supposed to be ashamed of
or wash away smell good once you know a thing or two,
& it’s finally humid enough, this second day
after the rains, it is spring in New Jersey,
I itch my eyes freely & blink down on gnats
that seem determined to die in my field of
so-close-I-can’t-see-them, & people are out,
look at all their beautiful bodies, so many
ankles & knees, clicking whizz of bike wheels,
car exhaust hanging in the thick air,
helmets pressing sweaty hair to sticky foreheads,
a racket of motors on the other side of these trees,
early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy,
this is no prologue but the thing itself, the mud
& the grease & the grass & the wet asphalt
on one of those steaming, streaming, sunlit evenings
after a week of rain that brought out the frogs
to cover the road up the hill. There they were.
No one knew where they were going.
(from https://poets.org/poem/garden-state)
Margaret Ray