March 15, 2012

More and more crowded with the black silhouettes of leaves the morning becomes as the chalk of a cloudy morning rises.  Closer and closer seem the trees, black against gray, they seem to walk right up to the window.  The small lace of crepe myrtle leaves makes its delicate pattern, the hand-sized maple leaves make a litter of layers, folding into something that looks like cut paper patterns, as if the leaves were holes in the gray sky.  The birds are still asleep.  A huge mayfly bumps against the inside of the window, futile life trapped away from its short hours of fertility or freedom.  We have escaped the fog, but not so many thick clouds that light barely shrugs its way through.

I bought and brought home a small paper pot of miniature daffodils for Mikayla's birthday.  Here in this mostly tropical place, bulbs do not do all that well.  We do not have enough cold, not enough freezing for daffodils, or hyacinths, or crocus to come up crisp and fragrant though the last spring snow.  We have early heat, spring that explodes into all this warmth; we have grass everywhere, and cane, and trees.  Our flowers are the hardier sort, azaleas and white spyria, magnolias and later oleander, in all its variety of color.

This week with the temperatures in the low 80s and the beaches in Galveston filled with kids on spring break, I kind of envy places of colder clime, where spring is just now shoving its green shoulders into winter, where flowers are just beginning to come up, and their trees are still bare and have all that leafing out to look forward to.

Crocus    

When trees have lost remembrance of the leaves
that spring bequeaths to summer, autumn weaves
and loosens mournfully — this dirge, to whom
does it belong — who treads the hidden loom?

When peaks are overwhelmed with snow and ice,
and clouds with crepe bedeck and shroud the skies —
nor any sun or moon or star, it seems,
can wedge a path of light through such black dreams —

All motion cold, and dead all traces thereof:
What sudden shock below, or spark above,
starts torrents raging down till rivers surge —
that aid the first small crocus to emerge?

The earth will turn and spin and fairly soar,
that couldn't move a tortoise-foot before —
and planets permeate the atmosphere
till misery depart and mystery clear! —

And yet, so insignificant a hearse? —
who gave it the endurance so to brave
such elements? — shove winter down a grave? —
and then lead on again the universe?

Alfred Kreymborg

I have to laugh about shoving winter down a grave and the brave bright crocus leading the universe into its spring.  Here it's the trees that signal the earliest spring, not flowers.  It's the bloom of the maple tree, the oak pollinating, yellow dust of the pine trees, even the grass seems to take a back seat to the fecundity of the trees.  The white or pink blossoms of the fruit trees, ornamental or otherwise, come early, sometimes twice a year, confused by midwinter warmth on occasion.  I just like the idea of something so fragile and lovely, defeating something so huge and so cold!

In this there is hope for us all, the very essence of spring!