Things That Might Go Wrong

Things That Might Go Wrong

John Steffler

I was trained to be cautious:

my father always there

two steps ahead of my every move:

"If you hold it like that it'll slip....

Now what are you going to do with it?...

I saw a guy try that once and it tore off his arm."

But I go beyond such rote-learned caution.

I am creatively cautious, exquisitely

sensitive to things that might go wrong.

Quicker than any computer my mind

scoots down dozens of possible turns events might take,

spotting the dangers,

clucking warnings automatically as a hen.

Now, lying in bed, I listen as

my young daughter goes to feed the dog.

Not in his water bowl! I think to yell.

Such a nag, I tell myself.

Always your fretful plaint rotting everything.

Poor kid.

Still free. Purely happy getting his food.

Keep out of it.

You'll make her hate you in the end,

look back some day and see

you were the hole that let in doubt and fear.

Even when there's no rattle of dry dog food,

even when I hear the dog slurping his breakfast

I don't say a word.

I lie grinning, victorious,

having checked all the dangers

and dodged the worst.

Light limited, light specific, light like a name

from "Lake of Two Rivers"
Anne Michaels

     3

Sensate weather, we are your body,
your memory. Like a template,
branch defines sky, leaves
bleed their gritty boundaries,
corrosive with nostalgia.

Each year we go outside to pin it down,
light limited, light specific,
light like a name.


Like any good academic, I have moments where school just isn't my favourite thing in the world. This blog is certainly a record of that, if of nothing else. Right now I'm working on my thesis. I have to hand in a chapter by Saturday, which is incredibly daunting and stressful if I think about it too long, but is also thrilling and exciting. Right now I'm working on my chapter on Anne Michaels, which means that I've been spending my time immersed in her magnificent poetry. The particular little excerpt from "Lake of Two Rivers" is particularly relevant for my thesis topic. And it captures a little bit of how I feel about light and nature and photography. Plus it is just blindingly gorgeous. On top of this I've been reading essays by Anne Simpson and Jan Zwicky to use as critical material in the chapter. It is moments like this that I feel profoundly blessed to be doing what I am doing. It is moments like this that I seriously contemplate taking a PhD because I don't know what else I could possibly be doing with my life.

Coffee and Oranges

Sunday Morning
Wallace Stevens

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirts lingering
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sing,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

What the Light Teaches

from What the Light Teaches
Anne Michaels

     4

Sometimes I was afraid to touch him,
afraid my hand would go right through him.
But he was alive, in a history
made more painful by love.

I prayed to the sky to lift our father's head,
to deliver him from memory.

I wished he could lie down
in music he knew intimately, and become
sound, his brain flooded by melody so powerful
it would stretch molecules, dismantle thought.


I went on a photo excursion today. I didn't really have time, but the weather was gorgeous and the sun was beckoning me to come out to play with my camera. So I obeyed it. It was the kind of light that begs to be photographed. The kind with weight. The kind with soul. The kind that has something to say. I'm a bit obsessed with light, and I realize that I might sound crazy, but I'm okay with that. If photography has taught me one thing it is that sometimes I have to get over myself and just sound or look crazy (I had more than one bemused look today from other people out enjoy the weather). As I was walking the title from this poem kept popping into my head. This is possibly my favourite section from this long poem. I know it's not about light, but I don't think that's the point. When you get this kind of light it has something to tell you about more than just itself.


More from What the Light Teaches.

This is the beauty of strength broken by strength and still strong

The Lonely Land
A.J.M. Smith

Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs 
against the gray
and cloud-piled sky;
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees
lean one way.

A wild duck calls
to her mate,
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall,
on these stones -  
are lost
in the lapping of water
on smooth, flat stones.

This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.

This is the beauty
of strength
broken by strength
and still strong.


I fell in love with poetry thanks to a really fantastic prof in my first year of university. I fell in love with Canadian poetry when I read this poem in my second year. Right now I'm preparing a mini seminar on it for my Canadian ekphrasis class. It's moments like these that make me feel richly blessed to be a student.

The Places We Have Lived

Phantom Limbs
Anne Michaels

                "The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal
                heart."
                                                     - CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer's hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.

Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.


I'm moving across the country in three weeks. This is both exciting and terrifying. I'm excited because I'm headed to a province I dearly love and find exceptionally beautiful. I'm terrified because I am moving somewhere that I know no one and am leaving behind the people who are dearest to me in the world.

It's funny how places retain the people who inhabit them. How a location can bring back a flood of memories. How going somewhere can make you remember someone who is long gone or who you haven't thought about in a long time. We leave impressions on places it seems; sometimes they are visible and sometimes they are invisible. We literally leave our mark on places with buildings and possessions, the kinds of things that archeologist uncover, but we leave a less tangible mark on a place. And a place leaves a mark on us. It's such a strange thing to ponder, but it's something I think about often, and all the more often as I wrench myself out of the place I grew up in.

What Language Can't Reach

What Language Can't Reach
Patrick Lane

And the only way I know how to do that is to stand far off
as if on a low hill under a moon
watching a passenger train stopped
at a siding in the distance of a prairie night in winter.
In the snow and watching. That far away. That sure.


Sometimes things happen in life that leave you feeling ways that just can't be explained. No chance. Don't even try. Sometimes these already rather inexplicable events collide and suddenly you are left speechless. That has been my last few days. So the silence on here was simply a reflection of my general inability to really capture everything. This will have to do. And I think it does just beautifully.

Memory's heavy with the jewellery of rain

Skin Divers
Anne Michaels

Under the big-top
of stars, cows drift
from enclosures, bellies brushing
the high grass, ready for their heavy 
festivities. Lowland gleams like mica
in the rain. Starlight
soaks our shoes.
The seaweed field begs, the same
burlap field that in winter cracks with frost,
is splashed by the black brush
of crows. Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace.

Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes
follow her across the field, stepping
from her clothes, strewn silk
glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves
to be looked at, swimming
all night across the river.

She calls through screens,
she fingers a white slip in the night hallway,
reaches across the table for a glass.
She holds the dream fort.
Like the moon, I want to touch places
just by looking. To tell 
new things at three in the morning, when we're
awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through 
reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. In this room
where so much has happened, where love
is the clink of buttons as your shirt slides
to the floor, the rolling sound of loose change;
a book half open, clothes
half open. Again we feel
how transparent the envelope
of the body, pushed through the door 
of the world. To read what's inside 
we hold each other 
up to the light. We hold
the ones we love or long 
to be free of, carry them 
into every night field, sit with them
while cows slow as ships
barely move in the distance.
Rain dripping from the awning of stars.

Waterworn, the body remembers
like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,
reclaims itself with every tide.
Memory terraces, soft as green deltas.
Or reefs and cordilleras - 
gathering the world to bone.

The moon touches everything
into meaning, under her blind fingers,
then returns us to cerulean
aluminum dawns. Night,
a road pointing east.
her sister, memory, browses the closet
for clothes carrying someone's shape. 
She wipes her hands on an apron
stained with childhood, familiar smells
in her hair; rattles pots and pans 
in the circadian kitchen.
While in the bedroom of a night field,
the moon undresses; her abandoned peignoir
floats forever down.

Memory drags possessions out on the lawn,
moves slowly through wet grass, weighed down
by moments caught in her night net, in the glistening 
ether of her skirt. The air alive,
memory lifts her head and I nearly
disappear. You lift your head, a look I feel
everywhere, a tongue of a glance,
and love's this dark field, our shadow web 
of voices, the carbon-papter purple
rainy dark. Memory's heavy with the jewellery
of rain, her skirt heavy with beads of mercury
congealing to ice on embroidered branches - 
as she walks we hear the clacking surf
of those beautiful bones. Already love
so far beyond the body, reached only
by way of the body. Time is the alembic
that turns what we know
into mystery. Into air,
into the purple stain of sweetness.
Laburnum, wild iris, birch forest so thick 
it glows at night, smells that reach us
everywhere; the alchemy that keeps us
happy on the ground, even if our arms embrace
nothing, nothing: the withdrawing
trochee of birds. We'll never achieve escape
velocity, might as well sink into wet 
firmament, learn to stay under,
breathing through our skin.
In silver lamella, in rivers
the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;
with transparent ancient wings.

Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,
silk stockings left behind
like pieces of river.

Our legs and arms, summer-steeped
slapped damp
with mud and weeds.

We roll over the edge into the deep field,
rise from under rain,
from our shapes in wet grass.
Night swimmers, skin divers.


I know it's a long poem (kudos to you if you read the whole thing), but I am struck deeply by the intimate connection she makes between rain and memory and love. It is so beautiful, and holds so much of how I feel about rain. It is supposed to be rather rainy for the next week or so, and I am hoping that despite the insanity of my life I will have some time to simply luxuriate in that nostalgic, beautiful, loving sensation.

Someone inside me will not get off his tricycle

Insomnia
Billy Collins

Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,

someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.

It makes no difference whether I lie staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.

What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?

Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep - 
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.


The seemingly ever-increasing stress of moving means that I am getting ever-shrinking amounts of sleep. It's a really lovely example of an inverse relationship. Someone should make a math word problem out of it. Billy Collin's image is so delightfully odd and yet so apt. It is a perfect way to capture the insane spinning in circles that my brain does when it ought to be sleeping. Instead of sleeping though it thinks things like, "Call that guy about furniture delivery," and "You need to buy pillows, and sheets...and a mattress," and "How am I going to fit everything into my week?" And I eventually fall asleep thinking these things. I know I fall asleep because my alarm wakes me up, but it doesn't feel like I sleep. Instead it feels like one continuous thought, as if I could fall asleep in the middle of a mental sentence and wake up finishing it.

I think this picture is a kind of bridge between the poem and my mental state for me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a photographic representation of how my brain feels while the poem is a literary one and I feel as if the two are connected. These are the wheels of some farm equipment on display at Fort Edmonton. The brightly coloured nature reminded me of the slightly-juvinile characterization of insomnia's persona in Collins' poem. And the simple fact that they are a whole bunch of wheels connects pretty nicely with my always-on brain. Oh sleep, I miss you.

But in the breaking, something else is given

Recovery
Jan Zwicky

And when at last grief has dried you out, nearly
weightless, like a little bone, one day,
no reason in particular, the world decides to tug:
twinge under the breastbone, the sudden thought 
you might stand up, walk to the door and 
keep on going ... And in the seconds following,
like the silence following the boom under the river ice, it all
seems possible, the egg-smooth clarity of the new-awakened,
rising, to stand, and walk ... But already
at the edges of the crack, sorrow
starts to ooze, the brown stain spreading
and you think: there is no end to it.

But in the breaking, something else is given - not 
that glittering jumble, shrieking and churning in the blind
                                             centre of the afternoon,
but something else - a scent,
like a door flung open, a sudden downpour
through which you can still see the sun, derelict
in the neighbour's field, the wren's bright eye in the thicket.
As though on that day in August, or even July,
when you were first thinking of autumn, you remembered also
the last day of spring, which had passed
without your noticing. Something that easy, let go
without a thought, untroubled by oblivion,
a bird, a smile.


[A truly beautiful poem. Words that mean so much to me.]

Storm sky of green marble

from What the Light Teaches
Anne Michaels

     10

For years I've driven towards you in spring rain,
storm sky of green marble,
slow traffic a caravan of swinging lanterns,
windshield wipers like clock hands.
Poems by Tsvetaeva on the seat beside me,
flowers in wet paper.

As the hours pass, the hard seeds in my heart
soften and swell as I think of your kitchen
with its stone floor
like a summerhouse in Peredelkino,
and of Mandelstam, exiled to Yelabuga on the Kama:
"if you must leave the city,
it's best to live near a river."

You fly out of the darkness at me,
twisting open the tin sky.

The thunderstorm becomes other storms:
darkness steeping like tea above Burnside Drive,
with its slippery crease of rusted leaves;
or the night on High Street, rain
streaming like milk down the windshield
the moment the streetlights clicked on.
I think of young Akhmatova,
under a black umbrella with Modigliani,
reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg.
All the languages they spoke -
Russian, Italian, French -
and still, their lovemaking was with roses!
Language is not enough
for what they had to tell each other.

Never to lose this joy,
driving to one who awaits my arrival.

Soon I will be standing on your porch, dripping
with new memory, a thin dress soaked with May rain.

Rain that helps one past grow out of another.


Yes, Anne Michaels two days in a row. What can I say? I adore her writing. And the opening stanza of this poem is so well-suited to the weather lately.

Rain that never leaves your bones

Into Arrival
Anne Michaels

It will be in a station
with a glass roof
grimy with the soot 
of every train and
they will embrace for every mile
of arrival. They will not
let go, not all the long way,
his arm in the curve
of her longing. Walking in a city
neither knows too well,
watching women with satchels
give coins to a priest for the war veterans;
finding the keyhole view of the church
from an old wall across the city, the dome
filling the keyhole precisely,
like an eye. In the home
of winter, under an earth
of blankets, he warms her skin
as she climbs in from the air.

There is a way our bodies
are not our own, and when he finds her
there is room at last
for everyone they love,
the place he finds,
she finds, each word of skin
a decision.

There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. Words so old they are broken
from us, because they can only be 
broken. They will not
let go. Because some love
is broken from love,
like stones
from stone,
rain from rain,
like the sea
from the sea.


This poem is exceptionally beautiful. The sweetest love. The deepest connection to each other, to history, to our own personal worlds. I'm basking in this piece. Luxuriating.

Also, the kind of greeting described in the first stanza is something I hope to experience one day. Whether in a train station or airport, I've always wanted that. "They will embrace for every mile." Lovely.

To break into the poems of others

The Trouble with Poetry
Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night -
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky -

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti -
to be perfectly honest for a moment -

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.


I know I have been inundating you all with poetic posts lately, but I think that another part of the trouble with poetry is that reading really good stuff makes you want to read more. Actually, that's kind of the problem with literature in general for me. I read something incredible and am struck with this momentary feeling that I should never pick anything else up again, but then I am like an addict who just needs a fix. I break into others' poems on a regular basis. And the more I do it, the more I want to do it. Poetry begets poetry, whether writing or reading it.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back

On Turning Ten
Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light -
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

I have been acutely aware of growing up lately. Sometimes this is sad and terrifying. Sometimes it's exciting. Sometimes it simply is. Regardless of what I'm feeling about it at any given moment though, it has been looming large in my thoughts lately.

Because the light says so

You Must Believe in Spring
Jan Zwicky

Because it is the garden.  What is left to us.
Because silence is not silence without sound
Because you have let the cat out, and then in, and then out,
           and then in, and then out, and then in, and then
           out, and then in, and then out, and then in,
           enough.
Because otherwise their precision at the blue line would
           mean nothing.
Because otherwise death would mean nothing.
Because the light says so,
Because a human being can gladly eat only so much cabbage.
Because the pockets of your overcoat need mending.
Because it's easy not to.
Because your sweaters smell.
Because Gregory of Nazianzen said geometry has no place in
           mourning, by which he meant despair presumes too
           much.
Because it ain't over 'til it's over. - Hank Aaron, Jackie
           Robinson. Satchel Paige.
Because Kant was wrong, and Socrates, Descartes and all the 
           rest.  Because it is the body thinking and Newt 
           Gingrich would like you not to.
Because I love you.  Or you love someone.  Because someone
           is loved.
Because under the sun, everything is new.
Because the wet snow in the tress is clotted light.
Because in 1941 it took six cords of wood to get through a
           winter in one room at Harvard and two-thirds
           of Main used to be open country as a result.
Because sleeping is not death.
Because although an asshole was practising his Elvis Presley
           imitation, full voice, Sunday morning, April 23rd
           at Spectacle Lake Provincial Park, the winter wren
           simply moved 200 yards down the trail.
Because the wren's voice is moss in sunlight, because it is
           a stream in sunlight over stones.
Because Beethoven titled the sonata.
I mean: would Bill Evans and Frank Morgan lie to you?
Because even sorrow has a source.
For, though it cannot fly, the heart is an excellent clamberer.


I know this post is a little out of season since (fingers-crossed) summer seems to be underway in this part of the world. However, the lilac bush at my parents' house never blooms when it ought to. All of the other lilac bushes are blooming like mad, perfuming the air and displaying their frothy purple blooms, but not this one. It's still just barely budding. And it will patiently wait until the other bushes have faded. Only then will it burst forth in a jubilant celebration of a season that is long gone. There is something about this that delights me.

This poem by Jan Zwicky also delights me. This idea that the light demands a belief in spring resonates with me. Light is such an integral part of how I think of the seasons. It, more than the often wacky weather, dictates when the season has begun to change.

Aftermath

Aftermath
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowan mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.


Welcome to the aftermath of exams. I have been walloped by my annual end-of-the-school-year sickness. It happens every year; I run on adrenalin mixed with stress and add in a dash of sleeplessness for about a month and so as soon as exams are over and I relax for a second my body succumbs to some illness or another. Last year it was the flu, this year it seems to be a deadly cold. Of course, I also have to work all weekend/most of next week, I need to move out of the apartment on Tuesday, I have an interview to go to on Thursday and grad is in a week. So, in short, a rather inconvenient week to be sick. As long as I have meds in my system I can do a convincing impression of someone who is not dying. It's a tricky balance for me though. If you know me, you know that my stomach and I have a bit of a testy relationship. Well, one of the things that does not generally go well is medication of any kind. I seem to have found a balance that works. At least, it has worked for one day. We will see how long I can make it last.

We read this poem in the second half of intro English in my first year of university. That was the class that made me fall in love with poetry. Every time I hear the word "aftermath" I think of this poem now. It is so beautiful.

To Spring

Sonnet: to Spring
Sylvia Plath

you deceive us with the crinkled green
of juvenile stars, and you beguile us with
a bland vanilla moon of maple cream:
again you tame us with your april myth.

last year you tricked us by the childish jingle
of your tinsel rains; again you try,
and find us credulous once more. A single
diabolic shower, and we cry

to see the honey flavored morning tilt
clear light across the watergilded lawn.
although another of our years is spilt
on avaricious earth, you lure us on:

Again we are deluded and infer
That somehow we are younger than we were.


Sylvia Plath wrote this poem in her journal in August 1951. She was eighteen at the time and finishing up a summer post as a governess of sorts. It was never published, but I still like it. Spring and I have a complicated relationship. I like spring in theory. I am the first to admit that the change in weather has a profound effect on my mood. I always find it amazing how as soon as the sun comes out and the snow starts melting everyone just comes alive. I've really been struck by that wandering through the school the past week or so. It's the most stressful time of the semester, but the emergence of the sun has brought people to life. However, living in Edmonton means that spring can also be downright cruel. There is no guarantee that we won't see snow again before summer. And the mess created by the melting snow and the sand and gravel that has been put on the roads all winter long is just plain disgusting. Plus seasonal changes mean exciting things like my knees swell (I know, I sound like an old woman). So Spring and I have a complicated relationship. I feel like Plath's poem gets at that sense of knowing I am being deluded and yet falling for it every year.