Every spring my heart pulls on rubber boots
pulls me along with her—

we tromp and splash where shadows
play across newborn grass

my heart’s silly pink on spring days,
love-bitten, chlorophyll-drunk

periwinkle shadows dapple dandelions,
shimmy with tadpoles in snaky

oblong lakes that sidle up sudden
in ditches after vernal showers

my heart pulls me in, I’m all yellow slickers
she’s tattoo of raindrops on the swale—

we play until all the little lakes vanish
into hot wet air—til I’m sticky haired

and she’s sunk in those rubber boots
feet damp and rank so we escape

north on I-75, chase heat-mirages
that flash ahead of us, teasing

phantom lakes, always just ahead—
summertime sadness on the radio, echoes of long-ago

mountain lake summers gone, summers we can’t drive
back to, no more shiver on the midnight dock summers

we’ll never abandon all reason
for cool deep blues and cannonballs

we’ll never ever float coconut-butter afternoons, never.  
Yet my heart skinny dips every solstice—

stubborn, she never ever minds my nevers.
She just laughs and pulls me in, naked.