The Leap in the Heart

No one can tell me today was a winter day. Phooey on the calendar, marking the vernal equinox at two weeks away. I think the Europeans have got it right, marking their changes of season such that the equinox falls at the midpoint between, in this case, winter and summer. It made immediate sense to me when I learned of this, and today is the embodiment of why.

Today, the bees are busy in the snowdrops. Snowdrops are small. You wouldn't think there was much to drink in there. But they keep at it--for a good hour now, or more: round and round again, many bees hopping from one flower to the next. The same flower is visited repeatedly by various bees - by the same bee too, for all I know. Can there be more in there? Are they forgetful, going in and coming up dry? No matter, their ritual is a wonder to witness from my spot in the sun beside them.

Oh yes, this is a spring day,for sure, and surely this ecstasy of bees dizzied by their passionate reunion with flower is proof of it. As are the flowers themselves, fresh from the earth, and the earth itself, giving way, consenting to the coming forth. It is a collaboration in beginning, renewal, birth. It is sun and cold, water and ice, dark and moonlight all conspiring in this revolution, this overturning of stillness with color, with fragrance, with spark. It is the perpetuation of life: conception, propagation, multiplication. Winter is the ultimate cutting back of all that is living, including me. And this day calls me forth, just like the bees, to hasten to the gardens, to delight in the earliest displays of the procession of splendor. The pale straw of the creeping phlox giving way to sprigs of green. Flutes of tulip leaves shaped to catch the rain when it comes. Beyond the white of the pendant snowdrops expected, the surprise of purple: crocus I had forgotten. Three the first day, then five then eight, and then two tiny clusters of yellow ones join them, with who-knows-what others or how many to follow. And that is the thing about winter here. It is just cold enough and (on a good year) snowy enough and long enough to accomplish a forgetting.

My skin greets this sun and warmth, this riotous return of bees and their drinking, with a wonder that is born of forgetting. As if by March I have grown accustomed to, made peace, reckoned with winter and all its accoutrements: cold fingers and high necks; wools and scarves and hats and the fireside thawing of the bones; deep long nights and short, harsh days with winds or temps or ice to brace against. Which is to say it lasts long enough to forget--to forget, I mean, in the skin and bones and tension of muscle--that it ever ceases, that a day like this one comes when all at once there is remembering, there is incredulous, giddy, pince moi je reve! remembering of bare bronzing feet, face, hands, of blues and reds, pinks and white, yellow and greens bursting from the dark, dead, flavorless, all-but colorless earth. And there is a leap in the heart of just the sort the return of a love you took for lost would spark. She is not dead, not gone, but here, stepping fragrant, soft, warm, alight with the promise of what's to come into your open arms. It is just like that, the moment when spring presents herself.

And it is then, in my unremarkable and sacred corner of the earth, that spring enters, commences in me a corporeal--fleshly, alongside her earthly--recreation. And once commenced, there is no stopping either one. The sleeper is awake, the yawning and stretching are underway, and the best day of all days is begun.

Hello, my love. It is so good to see you again.

dedicated to the memory of Margery Tawn

Signs of Spring

The light

emerging

Everything

begins again

or so

it seems.

Out of Dormancy

Sometimes all it takes
is an orange
opened on a plate
on the sill in the sun.
Or the failing cat
alive again come
morning. Or the dazzle
of sunlight silver
on branches one might
take for dead but not
at all and the sun's quick cameo after
wall upon wall of storm daring
try just try to catch me and I do
and am surprised, surprised.
Or pussy willow long forgotten
glinting fresh and new. Witch
hazel sure can do it too
silly and spiced and reaching
for the half moon in a sky so
blue blue blue. Sometimes
the littlest nudge will do
to bring perpetual
me back unstoppable
to irrepressible
Love.
To love
to Love.

Valentine

Today I am sending out much love, infinite gratitude and deep appreciation to W. S. Merwin, definitive poet and certainly no stranger to Love. I offer these luminous lines of his as a
Valentine to you all,
in celebration of Love.



Today it was just a dry leaf that told me
I should live for love.
It wasn't the six birds sitting like little angels
in the white birch tree,
or the knife I use to carve my pear with.
It was a leaf, that had read Tolstoy, and Krishnamurti,
that had loved William James,
and put sweet Jesus under him where he could be safe forever.
"The world is so bright." he said. "You should see the light."
"The branch is necessary, but it is in the way."
"I am not afraid. I am never afraid."
Then he stretched his imaginary body
this way and that.
He weighs a half a gram, is brown and green,
with two large mold spots on one side, and a stem
that curls away, as if with a little pride,
and he could be easily swept up and forgotten,
but oh he taught me love for two good hours,
and helped me with starvation, and dread, and dancing.
As far as I'm concerned his grave is here
beside me,
next to the telephone and the cupful of yellow pencils,
under the window, in the rich and lovely presence
of Franz Joseph Haydn and Domenico Scarlatti and Gustav Mahler
forever.

~W. S. Merwin

Excerpt from a Love Story II

This life is a light meant for burning.

I love: isn’t that enough? Isn’t it everything, really?

You ask me to choose you forever. I know nothing about forever. I only know there was a bird in my hand that flew, citrus bursting on my tongue, blood orange and pink in a ribbon across the pond before dark, and then quiet. Does that mean something, dear? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, this life is a light meant for burning. So I burn. And burn.

Excerpt from a Love Story

In sleep, I live a never-was. You hit the ground laughing and at first I am hands on hips, pouting lips, then I fall onto you, nuzzling hands nuzzling hands. And the carpet deepens green, grows leafy and I roll you onto soft needles and you roll me out of them--a battle of wills, yes, but not scarifying. And we rise smelling like a cat's coat and we are this musk and I pick thistle from your sweater, you straw weed from mine, and we turn for home, where we are: home, soaking lentils for soup, rounding up dogs from an evening walk, table cotton spread with stoneware and silver and the napkins too, smooth, the gauze curtains blowing into us. It's your same teeth in your mouth but not: they're brighter somehow. "Lucky to have a moon," you say--like snow over our fields of corn and beans and butternut. I'm making tomorrow's lists and there is no blood, just the background drumbeat of a pulse which is our knowing, the back roads, to avoid traffic, to make time...

Sweetness

The lips favor red
and sweet but cream's
fine too, wine-- why not? or
a good Irish stout or Mist.

Start
with a taste on the lips
a wetting--this is
long before the swallow.


But do swallow, and with
tongue and throat
examine the intricacies of sweetness--
drinks and cakes and snacks:

let peacocks kneel for this
sacred moment of savoring. Who
I mean who
savors anymore with

all this rushing--and you know?
When you come right down to it
it's the grave we're rushing toward,
no getting around it, so

enjoy
let the taste carry you
far, away. Hands off:
no steering this game.

And be sure
to miss
a few buses along the way
for good measure.

6/24/09