Generosity

Spring strews signs of renewal everywhere,
without preference or favoritism.

If only people would do the same.

A Day of Red

roof

quince

redbud

choir robes

fire and passion, too, in student, family, and colleague memorial service testimonies attesting to the powerful influence of a beloved Sewanee professor, a man I met a few times and left each time charmed and intrigued and touched by his quiet humor and intelligence

Rather than with the voracious tick that buried itself into my skin today

I celebrate the first day of spring with these inspiring folks.

I Feel Like This Every Spring

Oh, the iris. I can never find the words for wet silk of petal, shimmering cells, impossible comings and goings of color and line and shape, flow, furl unfurling and re-furling, a painterly fantasy of blossom. At least today, I found a poem with language as beautiful as the blossom.

Ikebana

by Cathy Song

To prepare the body,

aim for the translucent perfection

you find in the sliced shavings

of a pickled turnip.

In order for this to happen,

you must avoid the sun,

protect the face

under a paper parasol

until it is bruised white

like the skin of lilies.

Use white soap

from a blue porcelain

dish for this.

Restrict yourself.

Eat the whites of things:

tender bamboo shoots,

the veins of the young iris,

the clouded eye of a fish.

Then wrap the body,

as if it were a perfumed gift,

in pieces of silk

held together with invisible threads

like a kite, weighing no more

than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums.

Light enough to float in the wind.

You want the effect

of koi moving through water.

When the light leaves

the room, twist lilacs

into the lacquered hair

piled high like a complicated shrine.

There should be tiny bells

inserted somewhere

in the web of hair

to imitate crickets

singing in a hidden grove.

Reveal the nape of the neck,

your beauty spot.

Hold the arrangement.

If your spine slacks

and you feel faint,

remember the hand-picked flower

set in the front alcove,

which, just this morning,

you so skillfully wired into place.

How poised it is!

Petal and leaf

curving like a fan,

the stem snipped and wedged

into the metal base—

to appear like a spontaneous accident.

Stutter Start Spring

70 one day, 30-something the next. 

Sun one day, rain the next.

Just when the Blue Corporals, Fragile Forktails, and Citrine Forktails appear, the rain comes, or the temperature drops, or the wind blows and blows and blows.

Just when my flowering trees bloom, the rain comes, or the temperature drops, or the wind blows and blows and blows. 

And the leaves replace the blooms and the bugs come out only in late afternoon when it's as warm as it will be.

No lingerer, this cruel spring.

At least the British soldiers lichen doesn't seem to care.

Freeze Warning!

Give me a break! I mean, really.

Signs of Hope

Poet Neal Bowers wrote that in the southern spring "hills [are] white with dogwood / or pink with redbud . . . as if [the south] invented hope." The dogwood is coming (mine sport pale green flowers which, with another day or two of sun, will blanch), but the redbud is already here, everywhere, making everything else more intensely blue or green or white or yellow or . . . .

Even the pale blue water tank, graffitied and rusty, and the yellow warning signs and the weathered posts and the horse pasture -- everything so beautiful as if made new again.

They've been at it a while now

but today I finally caught American toads singing at Lake Cheston. I could hear their melodic mating song from the other side of the lake and all the way around. Birds aren't the only singers in spring!

Slow Emergence

Over the last several days, I've seen flies, no-see-'ems, tiny spiders, one moth, one honeybee, lots of multicolored Asian lady beetles (but then they're been here all winter), and one (I think) paper wasp. This creature was so (I would say bone-) tired that she weakly dropped from Lenten Rose petal to leaf to leaf and finally to a shaded spot between low leaves and stem. When I looked closely, I could see why: she was loaded with pollen.

Soon, I'll be in the zone and just as pooped as she!

And so this happened

and this happened

and these, too!

I'd say spring is on the horizon!

Even Just a Tiny Improvement

in the weather brings folks out: plenty of flitting white bugs all along lake's shore; symphonic crows, chickadees, blue birds (so many bluebirds!), and cranes (sandhill, I think, beyond the woods); bikers; students and a professor armed with binoculars (bird watchers?); two dog walkers with three dogs; a hammocked individual slumped on the opposite shore.

It is as if the brilliant colors of blood and cara cara oranges leaked out, tasting like the promise of spring.

More Like April Than

March
by Richard Kenney

Sky a shook poncho.

Roof   wrung. Mind a luna moth

Caught in a banjo.

This weather’s witty

Peek-a-boo. A study in

Insincerity.

Blues! Blooms! The yodel

Of   the chimney in night wind.

That flat daffodil.

With absurd hauteur

New tulips dab their shadows

In water-mutter.

Boys are such oxen.

Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow-

Waver. Equinox.

Plums on the Quad did

Blossom all at once, taking

Down the power grid.

April Is Poetry Month

In Perpetual Spring

by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt

there is a leaf to cure it.

or a bluebird or lady's slipper

Scratching the Itch the Only Way I Know How

from inside the dadgum car. 

Rain.

Again.

Dadgummit.

A Letter to a Friend

Dear S,

I love the Cambridge garden photos you post, and the beautiful prints that your Iowa artist friend creates of trees, and animals, and flowers. I only wish I could grow such beautiful things, either in the soil or on the page.

Once a year, though, I think of myself as a gardener, or a forester, in spring when the flowering trees I planted all bloom: crabapple, Kwanzan cherry, dogwood, redbud. 

I made these few snaps for you today, just so you can see what are missing here.

I hope your spring is just as beautiful!

Your friend,
R

Chasing Winter Away

I. 
At Lake Cheston, I stretched my legs, listened to American toads sing, watched a large snapping turtle settle himself atop a lily vine, looked up at maple flowers bursting everywhere, reddening tree limbs with little bows of life. I came to the beach, and there it was: the first dragonfly of the season -- a Common Green Darner, weaving in and out of the plants and last year's cattails, zooming up and back down with the energy of the season, the turquoise flash of its abdomen like neon in sunlight.

II.
A single spot of blue in Abbo's Alley, so blue, so deep and varied and startlingly rich that even at that moment, with clouds rolling in again, the sky still seemed blue itself in reflection. Trink's cow statue and I both know: this is a sacred season.

III.

I'm singing spring's blues!

A Note from Home

Hi Gay,

I know you're enjoying Paris and all the art, architecture, wine, chocolate, pastries, and sauces, but I thought you might like to see what you're missing at home.

Miss G is still yapping up a storm, the campus is (thankfully) quiet, and the flowers are popping out in Abbo's Alley. 

Today I saw daffodils, Lenten roses, those sweetly scented delicate white and yellow viney blooms (whose name I never remember), hyacinth, bluebells, crocus (the last ones), snowdrops, Virginia spring beauties, and a fully budded trillium poking out of a snake hole by the last little stone bridge below the spring. (Oh! And those teeny-weeny little purple flowers running along the ground.) You'll be happy on your next walk here. 

Spring is springing in Sewanee without you!

Your friend,
Robley

Hope

Emily Dickinson wrote that "Hope is the thing with feathers," and yes, I think, it is. 

But today, a day after woolen-socks-fog yesterday, hope arrived on sunshine bursting between bedroom curtains, and blue sky, so blue only a few light clouds appeared, and 67 degrees by early afternoon, and green moss and briars, and rusty fencing joining blue sky, yellow winter grass, and green stickery vine, and hope became the things that promise spring!

March 14

March 15

A Hopeful Sign

of spring at the kitchen window, this moth will, tomorrow night if the prediction of sun holds, be one of many, winging the bugs back.

Welcome home, stranger!

A Fortnight's Gratitude

Dear A,

I am remiss.

I should have thanked you before now for the loan of a camera.

But spring caught me unprepared, and the Nikon and I still struggle to make more than a passing acquaintance.

I have learned this: each camera has lessons to teach, and each person is not well suited to each lesson.

Nevertheless, I have stalked the slow spring unfolding now in flying things and ripening color.

May these thank you in my stead, for these are why I am grateful.




Fondly,
Robley