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"Spring Comes to Ohio"

By Joseph CampanaPosted Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008, at 7:24 AM ET

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Joseph Campana read this poem.

The first gesture is despair
because the snowdrops
have fled and the cold
came back anyway. You
are far from your love
and you will be nothing
but the space between
the hand and what it is
accustomed to grasping.
The first gesture is cold
but the rain still comes
down and like the rain
you lean your head down
on someone's shoulder
because it is too heavy for
you to carry by yourself.
Outside the boys are like
flowers and the flowers
are like boys because they
don't give what they say.
All the evening flowers
are coffins bursting with
possibility. Why not pick
one, why not let your
sorrow sink into the dirt
where it will die? The first
gesture is the hope that it
will die before you will
or that you will learn to
read it like a book. Come
read, come to the flower
beds and the mowed-down
fields where the heads of
yellow soldiers burst in
the grass. If anyone ever
gave you something, that
gesture of fading beauty
was the first sign that
the price of generosity
is the flower that would
rather not be ripped from
its heart. Come read all
the flowers: they were
printed here just for you.
Come read your heart
which has shriveled
into a flower receding
before night. If the sun
ever will come back here
the first thing you'll do is
reach right out to touch it.

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Joseph Campana is author of The Book of Faces and recipient of a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Rice University.
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