Sunday, March 18, 2012

The meaning of spring is not embedded in the word. That is not the case with the Spanish primavera. It's origin is Latin with prima being first and vera for truth and real. That would make primavera not only our first season of the year but its true beginning. Which for me is rather nice as I look at my garden with all the snowdrops and the daffodils in bloom, surrounded by bare ground, that will not be bare for long. My roses all have buds except for some of the canes which in their browness reveal that they are dead. Cutting these canes to the ground and cutting the healthy ones, at least in half, will induce the rose to survival and new shoots, which will become healthy canes, will emerge. My roses like my cats cannot really fend for themselves if they are to survive. Every summer I read William Carlos Williams's poem on the ice cold plums. In spring I always open to Spring and All. 





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
1923