The Tangible Spring of 2020: Something You Can Touch -- No Virus on Spring Blooms

 
In a world where we're afraid to take off our gloves and touch something, here's something you don't have to be afraid of touching: Spring. Plants. 
         New blooms; no virus.
         So I happen to love Aprils. They have their ups and downs, often in the same day. Writing this on Tuesday, the day after Earth Day, we are currently waitng for the sun to shine, as yesterday's forecast said it was going to do, at least for a while, before taking our walk.
           I'm watching the wind suddenly gust and blow off the last white petals from a beautifully blossoming weeping cherry tree. They disappear, these precious petals, as I look on. It's like watching time disappear. 
           But comings and goings are what April is all about.
           It's free, and it's safe. It's safe to put your hands in the soil, to work it, and prepare it for seed. You can also put your hands on on leaves, on stems, flowers. Cut them even. You can pick up last year's dried brown leaves, which is mostly what we do here in the first weeks of April, after leaving them as a natural winter blanket over all the garden, both front and back yards, to cover and hold the earth.
             Now they are ready for us to pack them up by the bagful. Twenty 'yard waste' bags, probably more. We have a very large oak tree, and a few other trees. 
             And when you rake away the leaves, you expose the new growth. That's the season's biggest treat: seeing new growth pop up.
             Earth is pregnant, and new deliveries come by the day.
             I took these photos at the end of March and the first weeks of April. I love the rough imperfection of this season of new growth.

              The first daffodils break the ground and then bloom with signs of the winter still around. Leaves on the ground, dried stalks from perennial shrubs, as seen in the top photo. I enjoy looking at plants in situ, especially if that 'situ' -- situation; surroundings -- is a little wild. 
               There's nothing very wild about living in Quincy, Mass. But if you give nature even a little space, things happen, as in the second photo, Japanese primrose. The plant blooms very early, because they're very small. This photo exaggerates their size... But early in the season they have space to get the light they need to bloom, because the perennials that grow up higher and crowd this space haven't begun growing yet; man of them haven't even sprouted. The primrose have their close-ups surrounded by bare ground and the dross of last winter. 

               Crocus, the famously early starters among the common bulbs, are shown in a photo blooming against a curbstone. Others bloom among the dried oak leaves we haven't managed to clear yet. 
                 Another classic early bloomer is the  Lenten Rose (hellebores), the fourth photo down. 
                  The Japanese weeping cherry tree I spoke of earlier was just beginning its bloom when I took this photo (the last on the page). That's the way things are this time of year. Things happen fast in April.

  

The Garden of Verse: A World of Wonder and Creativity in April's Verse-Virtual, Magicked Up Before Eveything Changed

Here's my take on some of the poems that spoke to me in the April Verse-Virtual... Everything in this issue so wonderfully seems to evoke the world we loved, or worried over, or had various issues with while also delighting in the countless wonders of being alive, even the most quotidian... all of this written before, of course, our world changed so radically.

            So, maybe in light of the more narrowed existences we are all experiencing, I am particularly aware of the presence of wonder in these poems.

            In Steve Klepetar's "My Father Quotes Goethe at the Restaurant," when the recitation begins -- "something about golden apples" -- an ordinary hour suddenly became extraordinary.

"... The waiter walked by and stopped to listen.

Soon all the waiters were gathered there

as my father went on through several scenes.

One had tears in his eyes, another stared at us in wonder."

            I love poems when some kind of special experience breaks away, organically or not, from the facts at hand and lifts us all, at least a little ways, out of ourselves.

            I found a similar pleasure in his poem about the "Magic Girls," who one moment are simply cousins, making Halloween decorations, and then -- wonderfully -- achieve poetic lift-off:

"How talented they were, those magic girls

who sang like wild angels and climbed trees

and brought home trophies every week."

Other poems bring home these trophies at well. It's the madness of spring, perhaps, an idea I take from David Graham's poem "First Day of Open Windows." The speaker is watching the truck traffic on a state road when the spirit of Walt Whitman, bard of the open road and "Song of Myself" inhabits the moment: "in exactly the American tune

full of stink

and clank, two men on a loading dock

sharing a cigarette and talking shit..."

            Others share the tune, such as "the lone cardinal," narrating the tale, the poem tells us, in his own understanding.

The American open road tells a tale, called an "omen" here, in William Greenway's "Black Pick-up":

"and so I pictured,

just for a moment, me, migrant,

squatting in the empty bed,

my hair blowing backwards,

on the way to some green field

of sweet watermelon manna..."

            Read the rest of the poem to see where the omen leads.

The elevated moment takes place in the mind of the speaker of the poem in Martin Levinson's poem "Making Contact," a kind of classic demonstration of the extended metaphor. A marital conversation turns into a sort of 'inside baseball':

"I haven’t decided what pitch

to fling to the catcher sitting in

my skull, who’s motioning for a

fast ball, which may not be the

best idea,"

... because, as the speaker tells us, the batter might be expecting just that. We know how important those 'expectations are.' Just ask the Houston Astros.

On the theme of memorable moments -- the unexpected kind -- Penelope Moffet's complex, beautifully written poem "Trust" has a big cat in its tank.

"By a creek in the woods

a flicker of movement

and there she is,

upwind of me,

fifteen feet away, cougar

I’ve been seeking for decades.

She doesn’t see me

as she comes my way.

Only when I stand and shout

does she lift her head

to stare into my eyes."

            This poems is about as close as I've come to being stared at by any comparable creature. "Trust" delivers a complex vision of animals and, especially, people, some of whom, its ending suggests, you shouldn't trust very far.

Mary Makofske's poem "Ask Her" depicts the state of mind of a student who resists the pull of a poem's word magic. To the poem's 'her,' an older student, the poem in question is a flight from responsibility.

"She fought the current, built 

a dam against the poem’s seduction.

It was clear she’d had enough comings

and goings, alibis, evasions."

            Well told, the poem is a tale with a persuasive conclusion.

Robert Wexelblatt's "Bolting" isn't about wonder, but it is one. Too big for a brief description, the poem's rhymed stanzas, alternating with the free verse passages, provide a kind of commentary: "Her hair’s fragrance is so sweet

            yet his liberty’s so dear;

            tonight he’ll kiss her feet— 

            tomorrow he’s not here."

            And I can't help quoting the stanza that's like an entire ballad in itself, implying the frame of the tale and providing the perfect, down-through-the-ages refrain:

"Consolation is the pleasure of soothed pain. 

            They were sometimes one: a May night in the rain

            when they got drunk and laughed like they’d gone insane;

            when she crooked her finger saying, Do that again.

            Consolation is the pleasure of soothed pain."

Wonder is dreamlike in Michael Gessner's "Irving's Piazza," the Hudson River retreat from which one of the first 'name' American writers found the components of his reveries. The poem's speaker finds his own inspiration in a Southwestern setting, where  

"the moon’s lost

delirium embraces the memory

of casual sylphs, enchanted poets..."

Find the rest of this poem, and so many others at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

Verse-Virtual April 2020 

The Garden of Selfless Engagement: My Poem on Emerson's and Thoreau's Encounter with the Bhagavad-Gita in April's Verse-Virtual

The Bhagavad-Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture written thousands

of years ago (estimates vary) as an episode in the epic poem called 

"Mahabharata," a kind of encyclopedic encapsulation of history and philosophy from a time well before the start of Western Civ, had its moment during the late 60s and no doubt is still studied by those interested in "Eastern" ways. 

         As I discovered recently, in reading about the great 19th century New England thinkers Emerson and Thoreau, classical Hindu thought and the "Gita" was very influential back then as well. Most commentators sum up its message as an argument for selfless action in the complex and imperfect arena of human affairs. In the middle decades of the 19th century, the outstanding moral issue for many Americans -- and certainly for the pair I'm concerned with here -- was slavery. 

         And, I think, we have our own equivalents today. I am posting the poem below. You can find others by me, and by 39 poets in all in the April 2020 Verse-Virtual here Verse-Virtual April 2020

 

 Concerning Engagement

In "Emerson and Thoreau Meet the Bhagavad-Gita,"

the poem that I hope some day to write,

our two great American spokesmen

lean on the wisdom of another age,

in another dispensation of human consciousness,

to seek a guidance for their conduct,

      or so I see the matter,

in the crisis of their day.

The Bhagavad-Gita, one tale -- one narrative gesture

            within a gigantic cycle of mythical stories

dating from a millennium we don't have on our side of the world --

in which a god not easily understood in Western terms, 

            Krishna,

speaks to the chief warrior of his age,

            Arjuna,

on the doorstep of the his culture's primeval "World War"

as he decides whether or not to participate

in what is essentially a civil war, as all wars are,

if humanity is your family,

and which he knows will result in great suffering and

stupendous loss of life.

Yet Krishna, Lord of All the Senses, Friend of the Afflicted,

(but also Beloved Cowherd and possessor of 105 other common titles) 

explains the history and meaning of almost everything

in order to show the reluctant warrior hero

why he 'must play his part'

in this most terrible battle of the world in which he is

            fated, destined,

and therefore must choose to live.

Just so Thoreau, and more reluctantly Emerson,

came not only to condemn slavery,

and to aid in the escape of fugitive slaves,

but to praise the violent deeds

of the anti-slavery martyr John Brown,

even at the risk

of plunging their nation into what proved to be

an enormously costly, bloody,

            endlessly consequential, 

Civil War,

leading us to consider,

What Do We Do Now?

                       

Bio Note: I write poems, fiction, and newspaper copy for The Boston Globe. My novel Suosso's Lane treats the Plymouth, Mass. origins of the Sacco-Vanzetti case exactly 100 years ago. A second novel won a competition for a work of speculative fiction, though still has no publication date (but who's complaining?). I've had poems recently in The American Journal of Poetry and New Verse.News. A couple of the poems below are taken from my recent poem-a-day project begun, for no particular reason, in early February.