Looking
for Spring and All
By
Gail Lukasik
When
my writing stalls, I often look to the natural world for rejuvenation. In the
following essay, I embark on a ramble, a journey close to home, searching for
the first signs of spring and a sense of renewal.
The first day of spring this year
it snowed, three inches of spitting snow that plunged me back into a wintry
frame of mind. The day before had been a
sunny 60 degrees making me believe in possibilities—bike rides and hyacinths, reading on the patio—what was I thinking? Haven’t I spent the majority of my life in
the Midwest? So on Monday I decided to
go looking for spring with my digital camera in hand, my gloves in my jacket pocket,
and William Carlos Williams’ poem, Spring
and All, as my guide.
Why Spring and All
and not T.S. Eliot’s more famous springy poem, The Wasteland? Because I was
on a mission of hope, not a mission of despair.
And I was hoping what I found would inspire my writing.
My first stop was my suburban backyard. Purple headed crocus punching through the
snow and brown dead leaves. Okay, I
wasn’t “By the road to the contagion hospital,” where Williams’ poem begins,
but I was “under the surge of the blue/mottled clouds driven from the/northeast—-a cold wind.”
For
Williams, spring is about movement amid the winter waste, about “stuff” coming
to life. So next I headed to
Independence Grove Forest Preserve, a ten minute drive from my house, because
the one sure indicator of spring where I live is the annul overflowing of the
Des Plaines River, which closes all the low lying areas along the forest
preserves’ trails, making biking and hiking next to impossible and canoeing
dangerous.
As
I walked the muddy trail toward the underpass to document the flooding, all
along the way were “the reddish/purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy/stuff of
bushes and small trees/with dead, brown leaves under them/lifeless vines—“ that Williams describes. But what’s not in his poem were the staccato
clicking of spring frogs, the sewing machine calls of redwing blackbirds, and
the tentative murmur of the river rippling sunlight.
There
were also echoes of Frost’s spring poem in the budding willow trees whose first
color is yellow not green. Chickadees pecked seeds from tall grasses
sending fluffs like hair across the brown fields. When I reached the flooded underpass where
the cars spun by overhead in their hum to be somewhere else, the river didn’t disappoint. Brown and sunlit it pushed itself everywhere
with a pulsing that I envied in its passion and its intent.
Walking
back I was caught by everything green that I’d missed earlier. ”Now the grass, tomorrow/ the stiff curl of
wildcarrot leaf.” I was so taken with
green, I left the trail and wandered for a while trying to decide if the green
leaves tight among the dead leaves were the start of wild geraniums or some
other wild flower I’d yet to learn. And
while I looked and thought about the green leaves, the redwings whirled their
song, and the morning stayed cold, as “the profound change/ has come upon them;
rooted, they/ grip down and begin to awaken.”
___________________________
Gail Lukasik is a poet and mystery writer who lives in Illinois.
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