Your best hello to spring poem?

[nolabear]

7. One of mine

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her.
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain.
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her
her white teeth,
her wordlessness.
her perfect love.

Mary Oliver