poetry month

April is flooded with virtue. For us, living in south central Wisconsin, the month is transformative. Blossoms proliferate. Fruit trees are covered with pink and white petals. Bees get very excited by the massive explosion of pollen and nectar. The farmers market begins its weekly sales of produce, of spring cheese, of potted plants and bunches of flowers. I plant my perennials and purchase my annuals. the grass is lush, the garden promises to be perfection itself. 

It is also the month of tax filing (that horrid American ritual that we all suffer through). A month of poetry. (I will return to this later.) A month of the first garden disappointments.

I actually saw the big failure out there last night and this morning I confirmed it: in my absence, whatever interloper (best guess: groundhog, but maybe rabbit, maybe a deer, maybe an opossum) came to my flower fields and chomped off most of the tulips.

I had asked Ed to spray them with our special hot pepper spray (very effective) in the week I was away, but the poor guy couldn't do it -- it kept raining and, well, rain would wash off any spray he'd put on. One count for the animal world: they definitely won this round. I will have no early or even midseason tulips this year.

I try not to notice this as I walk to the barn to feed the animals.

Good morning, chickens! Please dont scratch up my flower fields too much! Have a good day! 

(back to the venerable old farmhouse, before the rains came down...)

Breakfast, with the cats and with Ed.

Okay, back to poems. In honor of poetry month, I purchased You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a compilation by Ada Limon that brings together poems by 24 American Poet Laureats (she herself is the current one). The release date is tomorrow so I can say nothing more about it (though there is a lovely piece on the book and on nature poetry in general by Margaret Renkl in the NYTimes today). But I will go back to Mary Oliver, because, well, she was my introduction to nature poetry. I discovered her late in life (like maybe 20 years ago), and very serendipitously -- while staring at a shelf in a bookstore in search of something to read while drinking a cup of coffee. I was stunned at how beautiful each line in that book was.

I dont have that first one of hers anymore. Lost in the move, given to a friend -- I really dont remember. But I do have another one near me, titled "Why I Wake up Early." There's much to love there, but I'll just give you one poem, because it is so much a reflection of my routine every single week of the year -- the placing and replenishing of flowers in a vase for the kitchen table.

 

Freshen Flowers, She Said (by Mary Oliver)

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain was tender,

and took out the tattered and cut each stem on a slant,

trimmed the black and raggy leaves and set them all --

roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies, and more whose names I dont know, in bright new water -- 

gave them

a bounce upward at the end to let them take their own choice of position, the wheels, 

the spurs,

the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,

perhaps fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of music

with nothing playing.

After you read that, I'm sure you'll never trivialize the task of arranging flowers in a vase again!

Later, I want to go for a walk. As does Ed. A nature walk, even though we are just at the cusp of the growing season, so that you would have to look hard to notice the buds, the emerging plant life. Still, breathing it all in sounds so rich!

And yet we stay home. I fall asleep on the couch. He falls asleep on the couch. We are a tired duo!

 

Okay, it's time to pick up the girl at the school.

Gone are the skirts, the colorful shirts. She is turning punk. Goth, without the negatives associated with it. Why? Because she is a girl who has her own sense of cool is why. Because she is rapidly nearing the double digits in age. 

I like the fact that this seems to make her happy. That she had to learn to tie her own shoelaces in order to wear her new lace up black boots. That she feels confident and experimental in a very innocent way.

(Besides, she promised me she'll put on a skirt just for me every once in a while. In the summer.)

Evening. Leftovers for supper! It rained good and hard tonight. All the more reason to feel sleepy. Very sleepy, on the 1st of a beautiful month.