May I

  Dear May,   Today already a great clear sky & cloudless wide wide beside the mountain.   Yesterday I was remembering that William Carlos Williams poem, his So Much Depends, you know the one,   because I saw those white chickens, four of them, pecking in the grass, their red combs flapping, happy in their cracking open the thaw of sod & all there waiting like daughters congregating:   small wriggling things on pause all winter long. Still in shock probably, they won’t recognize their transformation from mossy bed to squeeze box belly.   The birds were not beside a red wheel   barrow.   & if there was a bucket I didn’t see it though it had rained & there was a glaze if it some place near.   They were beside the purple house – remember the one? An almost   flock of them, all business like in their tight white maxi dresses, oblivious & content & briefly free,  befor...