Hysteron proteron

Mother Nature: "Let us have spring, and then a good winter's snow!"

Small imp: "Let us have first colors, and then freeze them into crystal."

Smaller imp: "Spring magic and then tricksy snow magic! Snowflakes as big as quarters, and close together, so that nothing can be seen but the crows on the white roofs and a few black branches!"

Me, 8:00 a.m., thinking: What a starry, thickly-falling snow out of a dead white sky... onto the just-opened daffodils, the carpet of scilla, the brave little crocuses, the head-bent Lenten roses. Drat, where are my boots?

Spring & all

The face of a man who has joy. Photo: Jessica Hill.

What a delicious morning! Drove my youngest to school on torn-up roads under heavy boughs of flowers, saw a happy dog chasing birds, sang all the way home, and fell in love with an old barbering man named Anthony Cymerys who paid right attention in church. Then I wrote a poem about it all.

I flashed around the sky and landed safely, and never once remembered Benghazi or IRS targeting or any number of things that tugged at me this week... On a glad morning, I feel sure that right things win through in the end, and that being in the world but not quite of the world will save us from the realm of Babel, jargon, and lies.

Puck in Spring etc.

Half-title page, image
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Wave

It's busy here with my husband's birthday, and the need to get one son off to Rhode Island and another off to North Carolina early in the morning tomorrow. So I just wave and move on, gathering my groceries and supplies and washing clothes.

Read a poem (the nearest is below), read a book, enjoy your day...

Poem

Here's a poem for chilly spring, finally coming to upstate New York. If you take a look at A Midsummer Night's Dream, you'll find that I not only borrowed Puck for my speaker but borrowed from a Puck-song's metrics and rhyme scheme. This poem was originally published in Mezzo Cammin and is now part of my collection The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012.)

Puck in Spring

Now the catamount will scream,
Now the bears awake from dream
That the winter’s night prolongs
Till the ice dissolves in songs.
Now the daybreak fires the mist
By the mountain ridges kissed.
While the crocus blossoms yield,
Opening along the field.
Now it is the hour in spring
When the jetting sap will bring
Fresh desire to boy and girl
Waking to a brighter world.
And the fairies hunting shade,
Finding meadow grass arrayed
With the bloom of early bells,
Creep inside the fragrant cells.
Now in clearing, vale, and slope,
All the land is drunk with hope—
In the ancient greening weald,
Now is loosed what once was sealed.
Why, the very mountains reel
At the turning of the wheel.

Art for The Foliate Head
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Finding me elsewhere in recent books:

• Thaliad's epic adventure in verse here and here (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)
• The Foliate Head's collection of poems from Stanza Press (UK) here
• A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage from Mercer University Press (ForeWord 2013 finalist, The Ferrol Sams Award, 2012) here
• The Throne of Psyche, collection of poetry from Mercer, 2011, here
• Excerpts at Scribd