RIP Dennis O'Driscoll

Dennis O’Driscoll

FRAMES

for Patrick Taylor

I.

Rites of spring.
Bring out your dead grass
wedged to the blades
of a dormant lawnmower.
Time for cans of paint,
white spirits, rags.

II.

The cottage garden
in the mauve light
of delphiniums.with honeyed tongues.

Bird notes tossed
like blossoms.
A fern stretching
its wing.

III.

Night snails, pumped up
to full size, plump
as a colony of seals,
make the viscous journey
to a meal of hosta leaves.

IV.

Those daffodils,
you’d know it was
their first time:

so open, so eager to please,
so bright, so upright,
so unaware.

V.

The raw nerve of yearning
triggered off by hawthorn,
by the green of far-off hills
seen from your top-floor office
when sun pays out its light.

VI.

That it might 
always be spring,
a held note.

That we might
look forward
to long days

of growth:
haze lifting
like a screen,

waves peeling
off the Gulf Stream
one by one.


(from Verse Volume 21 #s 1-3)