Spring and All, etc.

There is a change in the season here, even though we did revert to a brief cold snap after our balmy days a little earlier in the month. The change is a slow greening, a quickening, a rooting.

This is one of my favourite times of the year, especially here in Nova Scotia, and especially here in Ferguson’s Cove. The ground is wet and dark and bare, ready for something to be planted or for something to sprout out of it, and the grass is shifting slowly from its winter buff to faint nuances of green. The plumage of the jays seems brighter and more intense, like the bell sound of their spring song, and the reddish buds are swelling on the maples. Everything is still promise.

JE, our second son, has written about the season and what it looks and feels like in Southern Ontario. His lovely thoughtful post, called The Greening, is here.

And today is the first day of April, not for me so much the day of jokes and fools as it is the first day of National Poetry Month, a month I love. For today, I offer a poem. It was written by my man, the good doctor William Carlos Williams, who died just after my eighteenth birthday and who has deeply influenced my ear, my eye, my understanding, my work. He is “my man” because I wrote my Master’s thesis on his poetry and poetics and because his work still resonates with me. I hope it does with you too. This is the title poem from his collection of the same name, published way back in 1923

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken