Spring in the Upper Midwest

Along with warmth comes the shifting-off of strong blankets.
How then to cover up the grey tones of Minneapolis?

Flour-dust? A city surrounded with silos,
the hollow cylinder is our stand-in for the obelisk,

filled up with powdered bones and sepals and stamens.
I just received a message from the Kingdom of Plants.

It says spring is nothing more than a series of small exorcisms.
Any bird already knows these things.

See how the sparrows travel in bullying swarms?
The kitchen tabletop can be thought of as a stretcher

for the wounded and the dead. And was that a gust
of sulfuric pollen or is your house burning down?

You can tell how all kinds of things are happening
on the cusp of gestating ground.

The open field also holds the tragedy of mirage and
the silo's likelyhood to go up in spontanious compustion.

Jasmine-muffled, our utterances are such gnomic rigmarole.
The spell, however, is more friendly than the dream.

And down falls the dazzling rain, the color of sound waves,
something like snow but with ulterior motives.

A covering which does not divert from its contents,
the quick powers that run up the roots of plants.