A Cold Spring

The green Theatre of Life and Death

I was going to write you about poetry and ink because I have been working on this dream job involving both but I felt stuck. Like poetry is too poetic to write about or else maybe I am just feeling slow about writing. So I went for a walk. Its cold. Yesterday there was something white in the sky. Snow? Hail? I don’t mind this edginess in April hanging in the balance of this moment between asleep and awake. The green cracking out of the grey. Little green lumps where the vine turns and feels something some subtle grape memory running again inside. But first to yawn. I went on a walk to clear my head and instead started to feel for this other thing. Poetic but a bit ramshackle. Tiny dramas of spring. Eyes peeled for the way light makes a little stage for right nows. I texture-collect with my eyes and camera. On the trees buds blood red sticky guard petals part the leaf. It opens the freshest green still half-dreaming baby and flowers the trees all have flowers greener than green chartreuse on the windsheilds of cars. A gift. Every moment now is an instant new washed. Unrepeatable because you can almost see the enlivening. And things not yet come alive. Or maybe will never, house plants left in the back alley roots upturned shaped to their plastic container and dead dry. Not yet the full flowering the main show of spring except the magnolia flowers which curl back pink cream leathery and open up so far that the petals fall off onto the sidewalk and when they fall they make rust coloured creases. If you are looking for them right now there are these little spring plays being put on everywhere. How is it that a cactus lived all through the winter. The dandelions out and bright yellow but almost without stems huddled close to the ground. The ground deep grey brown except for where the first ants are building bringing lighter sandier soil up from the ground and beside that the little muddy lumps of worm poo its warming up below too. And I remember that Persephone was goddess of both spring and the underworld. I imagine you too in the southern hemisphere on the opposite end of the edge of the season. Wherever you are right now I want to share this momentary mixing of hope and uncertainty with you. Alive! Spring! —JL