Notes on Near-Spring

 March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. For much of the world the lion hasn’t left. It is still a time of carnivores. Now, there is an urgency for spring to snuff out winter’s lease.

Spring is a season of commotion.  Are we on the brink or on the verge? A rapture of buds birthing not quite replacing the rupture and the rubble. To do honor to the fruit and flower we regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The old rot and the new ripe.

Too bad our man at the helm has given the narcissus bulb such a bad name. (Amaryllis and daffodils are in that family.) He seems blinded by his own reflection in the mirror of the pond, covered as it is with slime.

For the rest of us, seasons signify becoming. When I write, my joy is in staying inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish but to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the bus to elsewhere. 

I'm an unmoored vessel sifting through my cargo for new seeds. The mystery is not in the still-life of succulents, but in the cycle of the speckled banana. 

I’m reminded of the way Peggy would write a poem. She could be struggling with some metaphysical concept and along might come a dog or a dog walker with an orange cap. That dog or that cap would enter into her poem, incongruently, which gave the poem an inclusiveness as if to say nothing is apart from anything else and that includes the outer with the inner, the head mingling with the heart. The poem, like all poems, is about the writing of the poem, the futile attempt to say the unsayable and the ecstasy of failing. Wisdom is in the unanswered questions punctuated by an exuberance of exclamation points.

We are creatures in motion even in our sleep. I have an idea and sleep on it. Something happens. I wake up imperceptibly changed, maybe a bit more luscious, like fruit.

Spring is a time to align ourselves with the rhythm of the peach and the melon. Because of bogus ripeness from sulfur dioxide the peach got bitten before its flesh was ready. With the melon I waited too long and had to hurry my devouring. A loving relationship has to do with discovering each other’s rhythms and disequilibrium, the struts and stumbles.

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, a man is seen collecting bugs which live in the shifting dunes. He is later trapped, like one of his specimens, in this habitat along with a woman who has made of it a home. The static world is always in motion like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.