In April I wait

In April I wait for the ground to become springy under my feet. Do your bare feet recall that cool spongy feeling? You would have been younger. Or old and wise.

And isn’t it a kind of healing when the thoughts that grasses have are released and come to meet you when you step out of the house.

But April, like many months, except perhaps those of winter, come with dependable disappointments.

Having come from cherry blossom festivals and bright plum blooms and the extreme red of Japanese roses, the chill and marrow-stiffening wind comes like a midnight wrap on the door.

And of course, as I write, misplaced by a continent of time, wide awake at the wrong hour, I’m aware that my thoughts here are a kind of burlesque. If I could keep myself to a dissection of April I would be safe, above the grotesque.

But a mind is a slippery fist. You will spar with some buried regret, some aging lament—shadowbox with a barely made out shape on a horizon of fog until it’s Goliathized in your gaze. And you turn your blows upon yourself and go frozen beneath the covers without so much as a pebble of defence.

A hole in the night reaches an impossible depth.

But the mind, too, is an open hand. A magnificent paradox. And will, in a crack of time, forget the strength of its own weakness. And in that clearing you will promise the morning that you’ll rise to the advantage of loss, and see in every frozen fibre of April the calm warmth of summer.

But then I’m not the first to find that clearing. A clearing, says one poet, that you only find when you are lost.