the poetrysheet

whimsy, subversion, bowling

Number 470, Feb. March 1, 2004

Heeding the call of the open road

 

"Two drifters out to the see the world,

There’s so much world to see.

We’re both after the same rainbow’s end,

Just around the bend,

My Huckleberry Finn, Moon River, and me."

—Henry Mancini, “Moon River”

 

From one day to the next—Spring

 

The shift in seasons happened in Kansas City on Saturday. It was sudden, irrevocable, and profound. More than a feeling, more than a transformation of light, the day became different from the one before—as a whole.

 

Indeed, the light was different, brighter, more blue. Gone suddenly was the yellow of winter, radiance that makes all things it touches softer, sadder. An determination impinged on the daylight. It penetrated the sweaters and jackets, made us squint.

 

The air tasted of electricity and astonishment. Gone was melancholy and introversion. The chill invited us out into it because it was no longer that of winter. We didn’t feel the need to hunker down and pull our coats closed to it. Rather, it was the kind of smiling cold that we open our collars to and turn our heads in to make sure we are baptized in it. It is the kind of chill that promises warmth, that says, almost by itself, that it will be gone soon.

 

It was a glad thing to walk in this light, air, and feeling. Winter has been long, a gardener’s winter, with steep, determined freezes and snow and ice. It killed the bugs and fungus, opened the hardened ground through freezing and unfreezing to the workers that make it fertile, those wriggling, wondrous infestations that most of us would rather not think of but can’t live without.

 

But now it was over, and the time for sowing, planting, and breathing had begun. It came overnight and without announcement. Meteorologists cannot predict this kind of holistic change, the change in the earth, air, water, sun, animals, and insects.

 

And certainly, few can predict the changes to come in our compatriot human beings. Science, as much as we might believe in it, cannot determine what millions of years of natural selection have settled into our cells—namely, the innate knowledge that we have entered into a new time.

 

If there was any doubt, the next day, Sunday, crocuses had erupted from the soil and broken the crust of last year’s duff. Some had opened into the light so quickly that dead leaves still teetered on the blooms.

 

 

Five Spring haiku

 

I.

breath deeply this wind

taste walnut leaves in the air

pocket the sunlight

 

II.

children in the street

blown about in the playground

stream into shadows

 

III.

robin on the fence

sings familiar bright note

cat creeps, ears forward

 

IV.

smoke on horizon

congregations of new flocks

shadows overhead

 

V.

the river

mirrors ignited

wineglasses of sun

 

 

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