from The Enhanced Immediacy of the Everyday [American Poem in Parts]

daffodils exploding brightly in a sea of green –

I am busy amassing wealth managing depth bothered by money and income suck in the vivid morning air – registering the heat wavering off the red car
parked neatly on the street

in my house in my country everything is rabbits is trees
how I can I possibly convey the feeling of owning these things

I am an excellent cook, I am the bright riches now, a salty sweetness awash in my mouth I am speechless, bursting with approval, share this with me and your dividend

one day we will all relax in the pink we have planned for and trusted

odd how the air is pocked with grievances
while buds push forth from woody thrones

little motions creating the cicada effect
I can’t help but feel it can you?

sun, this stretch of grass at this hour
or where you are, wherever, touching the ground in some way
planted somewhere that backhoe that stalled
but didn’t, the five yellowjackets revisiting the bench
and my own illusions of readiness

the slender pear tree somewhat still or slightly astir in the breeze sun tea, flipflops,
it can’t be helped, we can’t help it, nor would we want to, what do we want, a
cheering small crowd and the occasional ting of a metal bat

look at the tomato plants we planted
the wire fence your words and works
the weedy weeks dirt worked into knees

Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press) and The Enhanced Immediacy of the Everyday (forthcoming 2014, Chax Press). picturing everything closer visible, a chapbook-length excerpt of a walk-in poem, is due out shortly from Projective Industries. She is a recipient of fellowships at the Centrum Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony, and has published writing on contemporary poetry, including a hybrid review essay of Anne Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy, the preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation), and, more recently, an essay was included in the edited collection Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press). She lives in the Columbia River Watershed and teaches at Washington State University in Pullman.