Spring Rules

It is Spring on the prairie.
Up here that means you cover up the sunburn
you got on Saturday with a sweater on Sunday.
It means you stand in mud while
getting stoned with the smell of lilacs.
It means brilliant green grass and violets
accessorized with diamonds of frost.
It means birds, early birds,
and insanely early birds doing their version of hip-hop.
It means shadows of clouds and bursts of sun-
cold, hot, cold, hot-feminine and fickle and always surprising.
It means tacky, overdone and undisciplined,
an orgy of color that brashly yells "look at me!"
It means perfumed breezes combined
with the stench of rotting earthworm carcasses.
Spring is ridiculous, crazy, overdone and a tease
we can't live with or without.
It is glorious purple splashed against green,
born from autumn's hope and winter's labor.
It is birth, new and ancient, squeezed out of death and mess
like our baptisms are.
And like birth and the new birth, spring could care less
about our schedules, it arrives when it wants too.