Waylaid, by Nano Taggart

I Dissolve: No. 31 from I Can't Stay Long series, by Andrew Kent-Marvick (USA). 2014. For artist website, click image.

Waylaid
​
May is playing tricks again. Winter rears
like records skip in deep grays that break
suggestions of spring. Each year does this
but we hold fast our rancor. Each year we
are going to leave, have to leave—must,
and it's true. (As we watch another year of
tulips blooms then, battered by snow, slump
into slush.) I cough complaint and scrape ice,
infer nothing from the honk of unseen Canada
Geese overhead—again, returned too soon.
Summer is coming with its snow-melt floods
for July then its months of barely-a-drop-of-
rain. I clutch my defeat with weak-kneed ardor,
you hold my collapse at the door.

Nano Taggart

Nano Taggart probably likes your dogs better than his neighbours, and is a founding editor of Sugar House Review. By day, he works as a fundraiser for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. By night, he researches new hot sauces for his collection. He's a co-recipient from a grant from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, and you can see some of his stuff in Terrain.org, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, and on some beautiful broadsides for sale at Art Works Gallery in Cedar City, Utah.