Another April, another spring, perhaps (like a hand, e. e. sd) another poem (for April is Poetry Month, as if you needed a reason for being) to add to the pile of last year’s leaves still unraked yet to be submitted to the compost bucket. Is poetry yard work? Pots on the porch stuffed with oregano, thyme, rosemary. A pot in a windowsill catches some sun and the King of Herbs is brought in to the studio apartment and clipped for a sauce of solitude, basil on the rise for an Easter souffle. The sun also rises this Good Friday just a bit further to the north, on the other side of the pine, inches past where it rose just yesterday. Basil is a commodity; poetry lacks fungibility – you can’t one for one swap a poem out for another, but you can cut a basil leaf in half. Maybe many a poem would have been more commodius cut in half. Basil Aristotle. Different kinds of basil: Sweet Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil. Lime-green to chartreuse – now there’s a word waiting to be put into a poem, if not into a pasta sauce. And the smell of a pizza parlor when you first walk in, the chef tossing a flour pie up to a target on the ceiling, never quite reaching it, spinning and flopping like a playdough frisbee, ductile and malleable. Slide it into the big brick oven and soon it will be a friable disk. I sit and wait for one of the cooks to call out “Pizza for Joe!” And I’d rather have a piece of pizza than a poem. Though Spring is perhaps like a pizza thrown by hand and fingers sprinkle on the additives, like adjectives, sundried tomatoes, green peppers, anchovies, mushrooms, bacon bits, green and black olives, pepperoni, sausage, barbecued chicken bites, pineapple rings, jalapeno slices, provolone cheese, mozzarella cheese, aged cheddar, pepperjack, parmesan. Ricotta, fontina, gorgonzola. Crispy crust, thick red sauce, garlic and herbs – basil leaves piled high! Raise high the roofbeam, Pizzaioli! I’m taking it home, pizza to go for Joe! I carry the big heavy hot box out and put it in my red wheelbarrow and walk it home where they are all waiting for the Good Friday Pizza Feed.
The Coming of the Toads 