Spring back/Winter Wonderland

 

  "Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, 

     its white flag waving over everything,

      the landscape vanished,

      not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

      and beyond these windows"

      from Snow Day

       by Billy Collins  

And let's remember.

A wet spring and lots of blossoms.

“Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, 

growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, 

were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. 

Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; 

tossing tumultuously under vast suns of 

jade green and balas-ruby orange; 

swaying and weltering in rich twilights, 

in aurora-curtained nights, 

they resembled fields of rooted serpents 

that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.” 

― Clark Ashton Smith, Lost Worlds

Wren

 "Spring here is at first so wary,   

 And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers,   

 Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two,   

 And then subsiding. "

from The Late Wisconsin Spring
by John Koethe

Trip to Shellbrook for drinking water pump ( & breakfast) deer, hawk, blackbird amid blue sky day. Hawk and Blackbird.

"Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze 
Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves 
Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass. 
The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds 
Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes,"

Taking the gravel shortcut back to the cabin we stopped to look at ducks. Instead, my attention was attracted by the drama above the slough. Most of the hawks we see on our trips are Red-Tailed Hawks, and this spring they are often being harassed by smaller birds, in this, case a maile Red-Winged Blackbird. I am always impressed that birds can shed so many feathers, as this hawk has and remain airworthy. 

"Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden? 
Spring here is too subdued: the air is clear with anticipation, 
But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation 
And living patiently, without atonement or regret, 
In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care 
—Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into 
Light and air and the nothingness of the sky, 
Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until, 
In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear, 
The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact, 
And then, into death."

both quotes from The Late Wisconsin Spring
by John Koethe

I changed my coat for this?

Yesterday we dropped by CDN Tire and I picked up four 

roses. It was cold and the snow was not far behind. But

the trees are budding and this morning we are seem to be 

becalmed between the seasons.

"We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,"

from Sunday Morning

By Wallace Stevens

On our walk today.

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.”

― Annie Dillard,
The Writing Life

A bit tired of the winter snow this morning.

“I do not care what comes after; 

I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.” 

from The Farthest Shore

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Spring Red Wing dreaming of territory and conquests.

"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien. "

from On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

by John Keats

Lately we alternate between skiffs of snow, 

spatterings of rain. hints of blue sky and a bits of cloud.

But it must be spring because we had to move the 

Forester so they can sweep the gravel from the street.

Yesterday we went for a walk in search of birds,

we found some.

"I remember you. You're the one

who lifted your ancient bones

of fossil rock, pulled yourself free

of the strata like a plaster figure

rising from its own mold, became

flesh and feather, took wing,

arrested the sky."

from Stone Bird

by Pattiann Rogers

Spring has sprung?

It’s harder to lose things and easier to find them, 

including yourself, in the light.” 

from Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll

Old and New

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below 

and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house 

with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.” 

from The Wind in Wllows

by Kenneth Grahame

Calgary April 3, 2016

"Then morning showed

Infinity's proportions, 

The proper height of the sky.

Becoming small

We were grown again."

from Growing up

Dorothy Livesay, Selected Poems [1926-1956] 

Helen began taking one of the dogs on a longer walk once she retied. 

Now that I am also home we can all go out at once taking long daytime

walks thru the neighborhood enjoying the small parks and the lovely 

mid-60's houses. Monday was a day of bugs and blossoms.

  

  

Tuesday was a horse of a different colour. When I let the dogs 

out I quickly joined them with a camera, initially not 

even bothering with a shirt. It was a unexpected treat with

snowflakes on the tongue and heads poking thru the snow.

I did eventually get dressed and leave the yard but it was the 

first glimpses that proved the most enchanting. When I came

into the house I knew I would turn to my slender volumes 

of the works of Canadian poets to look for quotes. although

 when I did I was attracted not to the poems about snow. 

But the poems about youth and magic.

"When the day bends over backwards

to bring forth the light

I must know by whose permission

I inhabit this place

in the holy congregation of animals

 and mortal stones."

from Magic Animals, 1972-1974

by Gwendolyn MacEwen 

"When a cold spell would come late in the spring, 

causing us to feel that some fundamental disorder was at hand, 

she would quote from a source I have never found: "The time 

will come when we'll not know the winter from the summer, 

but by the budding of the trees." And though that time has never 

come, I believed then that it would come, and I believe it still."

                                                                     from A World Lost

                                                                              by Wendell Berry

We finally arrived at the cabin to be greeted by a wide 

variety of duck species on the slough, the blooms on the 

Saskatoon bushes, the graceful swaying of the few trees

that the beavers have spared on the spit of land that juts 
on into the water

and of course Spring.

" An old terror, learned long ago from his time, returned to Andy

now and shook him—not the terror of the end of the world, but 

of the end, simply of all he knew and loved, which would then exist 

only in his knowing, the little creature of his memory, and so he would

be forced to collaborate willy-nilly in the dominance of human intention

over the world. "

                                        from Remembering 

                                                                Wendell Berry