Looking for a Poem

I read in a poem
that poems hide
so early this morning
I went looking for one

I stood in the
bizarrely chilly
Alabama April predawn
looking at a bushful of
purple-pink azaleas
beneath a dogwood tree
blooming white.
Surely, I thought,
a poem must be hiding there.

I waited,
regretting not putting on a coat.
And waited,
wondering what had gone wrong
with the weather that
it was so close to freezing.
And waited.
But the little effer
refused to come out,
if indeed
it had been hiding there
at all.

So I went inside
and warmed up.

Maybe in the pile of dirty dishes
I had decided the night before
to put off until today.
A nice little domestic poem
could be hiding in there.
So I pushed the dished around,
looking. I found
nothing but fetid water
hardened grease.
Plates with food cemented on
where I had forgotten to
soak them.
But a poem?
Nada.
Damn! There had
to be one somewhere.

I wasted my whole
day
trying to find that one
damn hidden poem.
I looked everywhere:
in my daughter’s eyes
and laughter--
in the dirt between
her toes and her newly
painted toenails;
in my dogs
eating their meals;
in my wife’s
eternal patience;
in the dirty laundry and
under the garbage cans.

Nothing.

Finally, as I was about to give up,
and go to bed empty-handed,
I realized something.

Poems aren’t always beautiful
or even comfortable
sometimes they just are
and sometimes the quest itself
becomes the poem

©2008-Art Belliveau