Thursday, April 9, 2015

Edge-Walking, early April 2015



Winter is shape-shifting to Spring in melt-water and mist this first week of April, 2015 here in Lightspring Glen. Winter arrived early last November and stayed so overlong that at times it felt nearly beyond tolerance, even for someone like me who enjoys its cold, stark beauties.

The vast white blankets of snow are gone from the fields tho' lingering for just a while longer in the woods.  And the deep silence that held sway for all these months has released its hold as well. The air is full of water music. Stepping outdoors now my ears prick up in pleasure of all the little streams chattering their way down through the woods.  The Glen fairly shouts with the waterfall's tumbling flow sluicing the gathered waters of these seven acres out into the Willowbrook Watershed and off to the Susquehanna River.  And just last week, like a magician whisking off a silver cloth, the pond's bright mirror wonderfully reappeared, the trees and sky floating once more on its shimmering surface.  

Always in these early April days of not-quite-Winter, not-quite-Spring, a subtle, earth-damp Presence whispers to me of resurrection, murmurs promises of seed-stirring and robin-song just around the corner of this month of my birth. My second winter here at Lightspring Glen, a second Spring stirring ... just to write this makes me happy and deeply content in a way that defies easy description.

But there's this. Last year around this time I came upon a poem of Mary Oliver's new to me, and none better has yet appeared (and I doubt that one will) that better captures the Magick of this edge-walking time.

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence 
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her --
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver ~
   



No comments:

Post a Comment