Photo Credits: Me! Taken ironically though on 11/1/09.
It is spring!
The season beckons exclamation points. Leaves! Tulips! Sparrows hopping and chirping! My heavy winter coat no longer suffocates me with its wooly warmth. A light spring jacket—in pastels! (Okay, that was a joke. I will only wear black. I will only wear black. I will only wear black. But it’s spring! Let us bring out the mauve and taupe.) Winter—dark mornings and afternoons; the dark branches of the trees stark and scary against the white sky; snow falling, falling, falling—oppresses. We become the darkness. But now spring brings freedom!
An unbounded feeling disperses through the air. The neighbors’ children (or perhaps all the children in the neighborhood?) have migrated to our backyard where they are screaming and laughing and chasing each other on this Sunday afternoon. I let my hair loose. The doors and windows are open. The sunlight floods my room. My desire to writewritewritewritewrite the many papers, which are so carefully and anxiously waiting for my undivided attention, is kaput. Stephen Dedalus, bah! Franz Fanon, feh! I draw the shades but the sound of those birds chirping, those children screaming distracts me from the dull, artificial glare of my computer screen. Easily, I abandon the drafts and stacks of papers and notes and out-of-ink pens and wander away.
Outside: Those little pink buds on the trees. They last for how long? Two weeks? How pretty is the world. I feel like a Romantic poet. I shall sing an ode to a skylark. A Grecian urn! A fruity cool drink in a tall glass. On-line shopping for handbags! No, I am not biking or hiking or trampoline (funny word, no?) jumping. I am living poetry. What more can I ask for of a Sunday? The summer (aka post-graduation) dances closer.
Will the work get done? Perhaps. It always does (I’ll admit at, mostly at 3am, when even the birds are sleeping and I can’t see the sun or trees any more and we may as well pretend it’s the dead of December). But why would I want to worry about that now? Now, it is spring!
EE Cummings always says it better than I could ever hope to:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis