Suddenly, it’s spring. I feel cheated and miss the prolonged anticipation of the season in the North, the late-February thaw followed by a predictable blizzard, rain turning to snow and back to rain again, skunk cabbage burning through the ice, the mineral-rich smell of mud in the woods. In Houston, it’s eight-four degrees and already muggy. The azaleas have exploded and I saw the first butterfly of the season – a black swallowtail – flitting among the blossoms on Sunday. Violets growing from windborne seeds carpet the backyard, turning it into a prairie, along with clover and a tiny white flower I can’t identify. I’m reminded of the closing line of Humboldt’s Gift. Charlie Citrine is asked what flowers are growing by Von Humboldt Fleisher’s grave: “‘Search me,’ I said. ‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’”
Here is Len
Krisak’s “March Poem,” subtitled “after an image by Anthony Hecht” and
originally published in the Spring 2016 issue of The Hudson Review:
“Settling
all afternoon:
The falling
snow
In
gray-scaled everything,
Ikiru-like. (A black-and-white film:
A civil
servant who will soon
Be
dead—soft-spoken, deferent, shy—
As timid
flakes descend,
He sings,
prepared to die).
“A mother
checks her rising dough,
While
weather weaves a flattened kilim
Outside,
across the window frame.
The snow
begins to cling
To swing
seats, piling.
The mother
comes in from the kitchen smiling,
Calling her
child by name.
“The snow
begins to end,
Leaving
white bread
Suspended
from the swing set’s chains.
The moment's
holding steady.
Outside, the
picture gray as lead
Awaits
late-winter/early-springtime rains.
It waits
till all the loaves are ready.”
Kurosawa’s
Ikiru is the most beautifully sad film I know, rivalled only by another perfect Japanese film, Ozu's Tokyo Story. A kilim is “a pileless woven carpet, rug.” Bread brings to mind Isaiah 3:1.
4 comments:
Meanwhile, here in Southern California, we're having the coldest winter I can ever remember (genuine snow for only the third time in forty years), and this after last summer's brutal stretch of 110-115 degree days. Welcome to the new normal.
Why is it that Europeans make better sad films than we do? Bicycle Thieves, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria will tear your heart out, and even the original Godzilla is pretty damn sad. (Really!) If the answer is simply "defeat", then maybe we'll make some good ones ourselves in the coming decades, as we're quickly having the starch taken out of us.
Unsure enough, Spring is teasing its arrival (or is Winter teasing its departure? Hmm..). On the CWRU campus bedding violets, candy-color assortment, bloomed before Valentine's Day. My yard whitened overnight with snowdrops, not just budding but wide awake. Winter aconites bloomed on the 20th Feb., almost a record at my latitude; and this past weekend, crocuses -- not the big named cultivars, the wee species fellas. Of course we have had bone-chill after each of these events.
I seem to remember (from growing up in Houston ... age 2 to age 16) that it sometimes got cold during March. It did not get cold very *** often *** in March (in Houston), but when it did, it was sometimes [near] the *end* of March.
(Note to historians: I lived in Houston from early 1953 [I was too young to remember the exact date] until late January of 1967 [the end of the "Fall" semester at Bellaire High School]. Almost exactly 14 years. That is [of course] not including my additional time living in Houston, later; during and after my years as a Rice U. student.)
-- Mike Schwartz
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