Springtime

Okay, okay, I'm back!

Last week was one of those unofficial vacation weeks when I wanted to be miles away from my computer. I didn't want to write anything or check my email or tweet or do anything except exist.

Besides working at the cafe, the only business I handled involved 1) planning my upcoming trip to AWP in Denver, 2) the mall (new khaki shorts!), 3) reading yet another Anita Blake novel, 4) frosting sugar cookies and eating Easter candy, and 5) sitting on the back porch generating vast stores of vitamin D and watching the birdies. I couldn't even muster up enough energy to take pictures of the budding hyacinths and sprouting daffodils and fluttering birdies for this blog--I was too busy actually enjoying them!

April and May are my favorite months of the year. I don't know if it's the lengthening days, the shifting color of the sunlight, the warm breezes, or the hard-earned eruption of green grass and tulip shoots, but I get positively giddy in spring. I'm always full of energy, but, fortunately, I'm never bothered with any industrious inclination to do anything practical with that energy. I turn lazy and frivolous, and it is wonderful.

Come to think of it, I believe that frivolity is highly underrated: isn't it basically a useless, desultory, meaningless joy and an appreciation for life's happy minutiae? Isn't a touch of frivolity here and there--especially when the springtime air smells like earth and rain and tangy green things--a necessary, life-affirming thing?

Anyway, go outside. But if you're stuck inside for some reason, here are a few of my favorite spring poems that might help you through your captivity. The first, William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," captures the difficulty of spring, how each year it is truly a challenge for the earth to recreate itself whole from nothing but scraps of gray grass and soggy roots. I love how Williams depicts the miraculousness of spring's rebirth in this poem, even while paying close attention to its gritty, grimy specifics.

The second poem, Billy Collins's "Today," is a typical Billy Collins poem: it's simple, playful, and true. While Williams's poem is better crafted, Collins's seems just as true to me and perhaps more relatable: why yes, Mr. Collins, I do want to "rip the little door from its jamb" in springtime joy, I do!

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Spring and All

By William Carlos Williams

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

---------------

Today

By Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.