Spring

 

The spring starts in June. Leaves that leave, increasingly, decreasingly, unceasing. Months linked with J for jonquils in the mind, June and July. Jaune French for yellow. These little occurrences are an assurance, something is predictable. Mornings might be bright yet the clock’s gone back an hour some time now. Evenings crowd with grey then rain. The mind is cooled, choosing the things to do.  The lungs fill up till they are full, then let go. The spring starts in August. Down the side streets wattles prove they’re wattles, different wattles as weeks pass. Bold as brass, sun rich, or as faded pastel in the air. Cold that pulls close the collar, twines firm the scarf. Mould along those old fittings, lichen with a new lease on life. And camellias, more than they can handle, falling like fluffy planets on wet footpaths, abundance of instant mush. Their pink is red, or their red blush pink, the words fall about themselves. Touch the untough petals browning down, rake them under the violets. Everything is flesh out here. Magpies create a temporary stir where territory’s blurred, the outcome all good. That’s official. Day is minimising difficulties. No going out at night. Tawny frogmouths about the place somewhere, that much is certain. The spring starts in September, plum blossoms pink little flecks on cold branches. Too late to trim the branches. Another year. Grass will have its day, its month in fact rain-absorbed when homebodies stay inside reading their Moscow novel and computer bad news. Home beautiful battens down the hatches as hail thickens, bouncing upon driveways, hillocks of ice. Leaves have ceased as leaves seize the day with tiniest little prods at air. Other days find freeway hum is feint and that motor-mower a blasted intrusion. The spring starts in October for underground animals, warmth enough to know the time’s now upward outwards. And a possum pendulums on a branch at the night window at midnight in the daytime memory. Warmth fills the morning that trickles down windscreens from frost of night before, the pull into summer, its yellowest certainty. Mind balances the meaning of heatwave with La Niña rains. Incipient signs the body imagines. How much the blood can sustain, bones endure. Clocks must have gone forward again, or back, or whatever they do at this time of spring. Time for a cup of tea. And the cherry blossom overnight, white and getting whiter, overtakes the tree in daylight, stems, sepals, petals, and stigmas hundreds. Quiet is the word. Next week the tree will be a cloud.

 

 

Image: the cherry tree at our back door this morning. This poem is inspired after reading Shane McCauley’s much shorter and very different poem ‘Monsoon’, with its epigraph from Madhur Jaffrey, “The summer starts in April”.