First Day of Spring by Ann Hudson

“It’s a wild March morning in Chicago, the wind
dragging its nets through the streets.
Trawling for its usual and plentiful treasures:

crushed styrofoam cups, torn newspapers,
lost gloves, a blizzard of fast food napkins.
I take my eight-year-old Toyota

through the car wash. Idling in neutral,
I ease past the powerful, shaggy brushes,
the nozzles spraying limp foam onto the hood,

and remember the sick excitement I felt
when my father took my sisters and me through,
all the windows of our ’67 baby blue Valiant

tightly cranked, the antenna pushed into its sleeve,
our doors locked against who-knows-what,
the three of us with our identical haircuts

buckled into the back seat, our identical shoes
drumming the vinyl. I was sure
those huge blue brushes would crash

right through the windshield and pin us to our seats.
At eight, a child sure of impending danger this
was about all the thrill I could handle.

I pull out of the car wash into the tangle
of traffic, past the bars that open at nine in the morning
and stay open, past the disheveled and pacing junkies,

past the crumbling theater draped in shadow and disrepair,
and make slow headway against the wind
that gathers the stray grocery bags all over the city,

whipping them against the masts
of budding hawthorns, silver maples,
bald cypress, green ash, green ash.”

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And even Margret Atwood said, “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” I’m going to do my best, although it’s not hard when you work in a sediment laboratory!

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Oh, and check out our friend RL in the movie trailer for the The Reaping (check out trailer 1a; she comes in right before the bloody swamp scene and right after a tight, angled close-up of a laptop screen.) Pretty cool, huh?

To make up for my previous moody post, here’s the wonderful verse of Christina Rossetti I’ve been trying to track down since Christmas:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow was falling, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Often set to music as a seasonal carol, I prefer the poem by itself – a wonderful tone piece.
As a side note, the verse is often uncredited when sung. I duly noted this at the Christmas high mass I attended last year as yet another accidental oversight. However, that little error did make me stop and think about the state of poetry and poets in the cultural milieu of American society. Is there anything more unpopular than poetry these days?

sun hangs low in a
wide blue sky. bitter cold steals
breath from my lips, lungs.
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Man Writes Poem by Jay Leeming

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what’s

the story down there Harry? “Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems
to be doing fine, he’s using a blue pen, most
poets these days use blue or black ink so blue

is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing
in a breeze of some kind and what’s more his radiator
is ‘whistling’ somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet,
but I’m sure he’s rummaging around down there

in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something
for us soon. Hang on—just breaking news here Chuck,
there are ‘birds singing’ outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes … definitely

a confirmation on the singing birds.” Excuse me Harry
but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality
at this point wouldn’t you say? “Yes Chuck, you’re right,
but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict

exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember
being on the scene with Frost in ’47, and with Stevens in ’53,
and if there’s one thing about poems these days it’s that
hang on, something’s happening here, he’s just compared the curtains

to his mother, and he’s described the radiator as ‘Roaring deep
with the red walrus of History.’ Now that’s a key line,
especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem,
when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems

a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line,
and who wouldn’t be? Looks like … yes, he’s put down his pen
and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck.” Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That’s it for now,

but we’ll keep you informed of more details as they arise.
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