by Debbie Naples.
SPRING
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Edna St Vincent Millay
Spring the mother load of madness seeps from the ground like crude oil, soaking the earth, an indelible, untouchable poison. You were thinking Spring was all happiness and light? Think again. This is when every plant and animal is rising up, disturbed, hungry annoyed, bewildered. Depression exposed, check books still empty, tax time, lost toys appear in the yard, previously hidden by snow… some just appear. Spring is a devastating affair.
Spring, the forward thrust of every plant, the noise of waking, the searing hot sentence of a seed, the groping white-putty fingers of first roots, small roots, roots like white worms untangling in the damp under-dirt, sounding out the alarm, the fetid warning of teeth of plants [under detritus] of animal eyes seeing night, burning lids flying open.
The vernal experience, an enormous cleanse. Bits of paper, shoe laces, plastic doll heads, shards of emotion left over from the holidays, dripping water, drooling clouds over March’s sodden trench coat.
Then April shows up barring fangs bleeding bark and sap, nodes of purple tiny petals screaming for a rake, a hand, a soothing word for the headlong fling into insect green grass cocktail soaked evenings and the potent image of a hammock…
Another day another rent another step in the braille-paradise of America, in the unseen waters of myth. Spring, bursts, bangs, chimes. The hydrangea explodes half-way, maybe part-dead, maybe waiting for better air. Don’t prune unless you know how.!
Spring: a carton of daffodils rotting after the flood. Tulip foliage, sans-tulip blossom, buds frozen over winter, buds heating up, viburnums unmasked, hot cherry blossoms pouring from the throat…
A Callery Pear, (a spring blooming woody ornamental that bears no pears), foul smelling overused in landscapes across the urban US. “Blooming like nobody’s business.”
A bird, another bird, another bird, a forgotten tree, perhaps a Maple, frolicking in pure silent leafless wonder, an interlude, more weeds, a lull.
Malva neglecta, spreading across the whole world, small round leaves what to do, poison it, cut it, dig it, eat it…Malva neglecta bullying the grass. Rumex cripus common name Yellow Dock, once an old remedy, shooting eight feet down, cavorting with the dead, unreachable, an enormous taproot, splitting in two, impossible to kill, then leaping four feet up, light airyseeds covering your dog. Your dog does not care.
And hands the first members of the tool workforce open and closing fists blooming like flowers, arthritic, stiff, in need of power tools.
The soul embedded in a life and death trance, rolling down the cool hard ground like a polished stone.
And there you are, standing alone in a great lush field of wild flowers, pondering the deep tragedy. You have zealously lopped off the buds of your old world hydrangea, the viburnum carlsii-Korean Spice, the amazingly fragrant slow growing upright shrub, that according to Michael Dirr, “actually reaches out and engulfs thepasserby,”,the smell that promotes world peace…just not in your garden. You have systematically removed all those buds as well.
How you failed to read up on your hydrageas and cut back the one that sets it blooms in the FALL! what would be old wood…
expectant yearn pine
(excerpted from Get a Rake, by Debbie Naples, coming out from Exterminating Angel Press in Spring 2016)