2007
Good Friday’s gone

Every April,
when the cellophane grass, chocolate rabbits,
and squishy bitter yellow chicks appear,
I realize once again Good Friday’s gone.
When I was a kid back home,
in the second-biggest city in Vermont,
the whole world as I knew it shut down
between noon and three o’clock
the day Christ died. There was no school
and the weather was always unseasonably
warm and sunny. I used to wander
in a post-Apocalyptic daze. I loved the darkness
behind store windows, loneliness
of the streets, where few cars crawled by
all those slow three hours, and no one was out and about
but me. I admit I wasn’t thinking deep religious
thoughts. I probably caught a few disapproving glares
over the years, though I never noticed.
But I’m nostalgic now for those bleak collaborations,
the force of will that kept my neighbors
shuttered from the sun, even if snow
was forecast for Easter, as it often was.
I miss the watch I kept those hours,
feverish, morbid, but not irreverent,
and how the world came back to miraculous life
each mid-afternoon, and roused the mystery
of my peculiar faith.