Garden State

The world smells green & wet & today I

am in a postlapsarian good mood 

as I meander by the Raritan canal, 

no longer moving in a deadly torpor 

like a winter fly, but thinking once again 

(the warming weather) about sex in a good way, 

how all those smells you’re supposed to be ashamed of 

or wash away smell good once you know a thing or two, 

& it’s finally humid enough, this second day 

after the rains, it is spring in New Jersey, 

I itch my eyes freely & blink down on gnats 

that seem determined to die in my field of 

so-close-I-can’t-see-them, & people are out, 

look at all their beautiful bodies, so many 

ankles & knees, clicking whizz of bike wheels, 

car exhaust hanging in the thick air, 

helmets pressing sweaty hair to sticky foreheads, 

a racket of motors on the other side of these trees, 

early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy, 

this is no prologue but the thing itself, the mud 

& the grease & the grass & the wet asphalt 

on one of those steaming, streaming, sunlit evenings 

after a week of rain that brought out the frogs 

to cover the road up the hill. There they were. 

No one knew where they were going.