Relief Is Here—The Quikening

Spring is taking.  It has a hold on things.  Her temperature hasn’t quite conquered the naysayers of continuing winter, but the sun’s up higher and higher; longer and longer.  The sky is so perfectly blue it stuns the senses.  And the trees are quickening.  Willows have yellow skirts.  Some of the certain spruces are peaking golden edges through the evergreen.  Reversing their shadows into gilding.  There are buds on the crabapples and the pussy willows made an appearance today in the grocer’s tubs down at the supermarket.

Almost exactly two weeks ago I wrote this poem.  I haven’t written a poem, seriously, for two years or more—since I wrapped up my book, Moonlit Baying.  Just haven’t had the sap.

Goose Beaks
Firmly pointed South
and calling to the formation.
Muskrats out on the ice
studiously study
the thawed stream
between the floes.
Cormorant glide.
The Heron are
expected back
in moments.

This year.  This month.  This March in Michigan.  This Now.  This quickening inside everything around us as we nestle against Park Lake, here, has me harkening to an inner calling.  So many things are budding inside.  So much is wanting to come to fruition, it has become such an internal spring for Carol and me that we feel we are, utterly, a part of the willows we see on the lake shore:  We wanna dance with our leaves showing; waving on supple green threads in a warm breeze.

Yesterday, as we sat on the picnic table outside one of the lean-tos on the beach, we watched a massive flotilla of Bufflehead ducks taking off and landing.  Practicing their flight after bedding down on the cold surface of the lake water for three or four days.  They rose as one and formed three-dimensional kaleidoscopic images with their grouping and curving, their in-flow and out-flow in the low sky.  Down, down to the surface to tease the water and then sweeping, so very grandly, up again toward the blue center of the universe.  Particle physics in the shape of black and white diving ducks to the liquidity of a Debussy sound track.

Buffleheads are diving ducks.  We thought them Cormorant, at first.  But we looked them up on the internet.  There was a picture of them:  Buffleheads.

We have, once more, become “birders”.

Nature’s sweet rising, as Spring rises to meet nature, has us in her thrall.  And we are content to rest there, in her embrace, a few moments, before we, too, sweep and swirl into the ether.

Such a hankering for creativity, we are fairly bubbling.

Thought you might like to know.

Hoping you feel the same way, too.

Spring.

Relief is here.