Spring Sprung

Spring is like a perhaps hand, wrote e.e.cummings, coming out of nowhere…. arranging, placing there a strange thing, here a known thing / changing everything. 

We never celebrate the end of spring, only the beginning. The rapture of the burst but not the gust of the rupture. To do honor to the fruit we need to regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The ripe and the rot. As D.H. Lawrence wrote, the marriage of heaven and hell.

As a counter-narrative to William Carlos Williams (No ideas but in things), it is not enough to focus on the thing or the being. The real task is to consider the becoming. When I write, my joy is to stay inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish, to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the flying carpet, catch the bus to elsewhere. Each fruit is on its way to somewhere, maybe nowhere, a micro enactment of ourselves.  

Only the sun and moon are eternal and we’re not so sure about them either. We have to settle for the happy illusion of finding immortality in those fleeting instances we can be altered by. There lies the mystery. Not in the fixed succulents of the still-life but the way 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. She gave it a line, 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 still the temporal 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. We had an idea and slept on it. Something happened. We wake up a smidge different along with the summer fruit.

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

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, which I recently watched, 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 as sand seems transformed to water, like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.