poorly written Spring post

I tell myself I don't want to tell a story of adventure and remorse; the tale of the older Jewish man in a coat his friend made of old American flags at the Anarchist teach-in in Colorado who wrapped Tefillin in the lobby during breakfast all the while making outdated but funny political commentary can wait for another day; that these long awaited sparks of hilarity in conversation aren't for the page until I can write a decent poem; for now the page is for the forelorn beauty of the world of the inner reflection of whatever emotion I can muster. It may or may not be a lie, but right now I can watch this rain spill down Sarah Street and remember Schenley Park this morning in the mist, the dog loose and not eager to be leashed, the blocks of concrete and cement and relics of some demolished house. There was that great smell that comes with a good rain storm on a warm day in March, not rotten or composted, but fresh and alive and earthen. Makes one wonder if the story of Jesus' resurrection was actually written in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in March or April – after a long winter so dead and secluded, a day like this could resurrect just about anything.

It makes me wonder about perennial flowers. I imagine someone sitting in a bleak garden in February, wondering if they will ever manage to put on shoes that aren't made for wading through a foot snow, if their tailbones will ever again feel the satisfaction of not having hit the hard ice in the past two weeks, if anything will ever grow again or is this the ice age coming. And then the snow melts and it's all mud and work and mud and still the question if the world is gangrenous with frostbite and destined to just rot off, and the poor gardener sits up on her knees and says, damnit if there can't be at least something already growing to look forward to. So now, some years later, here are these wonderful little tulips popping their stiff leaves through the soil with all their delicate might, and I can say with certainty, okay, so we will survive after all.

My friend Eric is visiting from Chicago with the plan to somehow move here, and he was dumbfounded to see people out on a morning like this, just like we were, carrying on with their dogs or bikes or soccer balls. They must live in a place that has tulips budding as well, I thought, and were also reminded when they woke up that the rain was good, and 50 degrees is comparatively warm, and hell if we'll be confined to our own ruins when who knows what else is budding out there in the world! Pittsburgh is all agrow, all stiff-leaved and trying, excited to once again feel the mud between our toes.

So here's a poem, not the poem I originally wanted to post (and in a perfect world, the poem would be newly written by yours truly but even I have reasonably expectations of myself in that regard), but it's a classic and almost perfect one.

Spring and All,
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