April 3, 2012

Morning moving though the change of hours, sunny in spots, overcast, rain immanent, or perhaps not.  The air leaning a heavy hand against everything, holding it all still.  Even the birds seem sluggish and sleepy this morning, only a couple murmuring in the trees.  The squirrel dozing in the crook of a branch, its tail looped around its body.  It didn't even wake when the cat strolled through the yard.  We've had a visiting cat, an orange tabby, that seems quite friendly.  Michael says if you pet it, it will glom onto you and you will be petting it forever.  It looks like a small fire spreading across the grass, warm and fluid, bright with hot color against the cool green of the grass. 

When I went out into the yard yesterday, I saw baby maples everywhere, growing in the debris on the outside table, in abandoned flowerpots, in the cracks in the driveway, in little clumps in the grass.  They will sprout anywhere there is the least bit of dirt or moisture, because sometimes there is no dirt where they sprout, they carry their first nourishment in the seed.  I am amazed at the proliferation of them.  It seems there would be more volunteer maples growing around here, like the tallow trees that spring up everywhere.  Perhaps the climate is better for tallow trees than maples, or maybe maple seeds don't land that far afield.  I just know that if the back yard is any indication, we should be crowded out by maple trees! 

For years I have thought that making a poem is kind of like composting, that everything you see or feel or notice goes into your mind and lives there in the silent dark until it sprouts and you have the beginning of the connections that make the poem.   Something triggers all those buried associations and brings them together, and then you begin to work on them, finding words or images that make those connections stronger, more vivid, more valuable and you perhaps end up with a poem.   Today I found a poem about composting and it includes the sprouting of tiny green things from the dark richness that is the compost, and other things that like that dark warmth 

The Compost Heap 

It waxed with autumn, when the leaves—
Dogwood, oak and sycamore—
Avalanched the yard and slipped
Like unpaid bills beneath the door. 

In winter it gave off a warmth
And held its ground against the snow,
The barrow of the buried year,
The swelling that spring stirred below.

In summer, we’d identify
The volunteers and green recruits,
A sapling apple or a pear
That stemmed from bruised and bitten fruits. 

And everything we threw away
And we forgot, would by and by
Return to earth, or drop its seed
Take root and start to ramify. 

We left the garden in the Fall—
You turned the heap up with a rake
And startled latent in its heart
The dark glissando of the snake. 

A. E. Stallings  

 

Who could resist that last stanza? The rhythm, the lovely sounds of all those liquid ells, the sudden rush of "zero at the bone" when you see a snake, all comes crashing together at the end.  Yet earlier in the poem the leaves under the door, we get that, so many leaves tracked in every fall, even in the spring from that oak that sheds its leaves all at once, new leaves pushing the old ones out.   And the idea that the things we throw away and forgot could brings us new life, new connections, early ideas returning, old beliefs resurrected, all part of the compost of thought.   Also, a new word for me . . . I did not know . . . ramify, never once heard it in all my reading.  When I looked it up, it did not mean quite what I thought, which was sprout or grow.  I found it means branch out, spread out by branching, and by implication a complication, complicating a problem or a situation.   It makes me think the poet used that word to hint at the snake, but I missed it because I did not know the word, and I really like that word!  I shall have to find some situation where I can use it! 

Well I hope you don't have any situations that get ramified today!  That everything that is surprising or sprouting is something that will bring you pleasure!

Maple seedlings from our driveway and outside table!