My children went back to school yesterday. First day of school in the new year, but they are still wrapping up the first semester. The trees are bare still; the lawn still only two-thirds raked from the fall of leaves and pine needles.
The kitchen window still wants washing, and only yesterday I scrubbed last year’s dirt from the bathtub. The boys still annoy each other with the command to, “Chill,” and so we had it out (again) in the car this morning. And it was still cold outside from the winter that began last year.
Here in 2013, I am still not finished reading The Lemon Tree or Doctor Faustus. The current draft of my novel is still not done. And my mind, when left to its own devices, perseverates still on tired things: decisions made last spring; comments delivered in last year’s September; relationships as old as old.
And we still have no snow, while it feels for all the world that all the rest of the world does.
But this morning the water in the bird bath was all gone (again) to ice, and the field and its wire fence near the school were glistening with it. And also the bare trees, holding their arms still to cradle it. And the split-rail fence along the driveway. And the leaves of the Russian sage– all of them limned with frost so that, even hurrying into the house (from the cold), I could make out every vein.
being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land
(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well
-e.e. cummings
