5 year oaklings in gravel parking lot median on a fine April night

the trees backlit
by steroid lot light beautiful as any song
new leaves muscling apart tender buds
might feel a thousand pricks
like a limb in the night after your autopilot moves you
to shift your tourniquet weight
presents to your consciousness a catalog of nerves
influxed by the suffuse of blood from the rush of veins
out to every little cell that makes you whole

have you felt it? the coming alive,
if you had passed unconscious through
stillness fixed as frozen soil
it might seem then
that life is too fierce an effect to follow
dust to dust

and yet
sap rises, rivers flow, the thawing ground
shifts its weight and the crust is pricked right through
and there is perhaps no life that
could be free from such suffusing motion