Spring Memorial

And when I think of spring, I think of love, I remember again
the night my roots exploded and mud sloshed in my guts.

O spring! Beautiful spring! How you resex the swinging trees
and sing our trembling skins to sleep.

—Spencer Reece, “Ghazals for Spring”

It is May, it is moonlit. It is raining, it is shining. It is glassy, every passerby reflecting back our wideawake faces, reflecting the sheen of spring. It is warm, it is quiet, we could tear off our shirts and kiss whoever we want and still the streets would go on as always.

In the parks the leaves are growing heavy and cast overlapping shadows as the morning light passes through the city. One leaf has already set sail from its maple and spins around as we stand in Central Park. It follows the wind’s course, vaster than our hands and more slow.

The minutes stretch out and become years: from dark terra cotta red to orchid pink to amber, a visible maturation into adolescence. The sun has always been there—has not even moved for all the earth’s spinning—but now we call it reborn, and we call the day begun.

Here the day goes walking on its own, fresh in its long adulthood. And what does the day see? A tree, trees, springtime’s vivid explosion of color, perfume, the forceful flood of life made new.

As with life, so with love. The new couples talk and repose on the hills and the rocks, as if they had grown out of the earth in pairs. And maybe they did—here they are united, here their eyes have aligned. Life outside the park has become forgettable and unreal. The overfull lake is choked with rowboats, and pairs of oars are pushing lazily against the currents underwater as the men abovewater hold wine bottles over wineglasses.

(We lie in the spring, we lie about being sure, we lie on the grass, we lie to make ourselves happy, we lie for someone else’s happiness, we lie despite the warnings, we lie in the shade, we lie inside each other’s arms, we lie with ease and unease, we lie awake, we lie sleepily, we lie between the past and the future, we lie as we taught ourselves to, we lie forgetfully, we lie under the sun that has gone walking to the west.)

At the end of the sun’s journey are the dusklands, and when the darkness takes away our skins, we let ourselves look with all our eyes at what remains. In the night we see raindrops and the green light of fireflies and the faint, beating hearts of the people we tell ourselves we should not love—but it is springtime, everything hard and cold is falling away from ourselves, and it would only be right to let ourselves go free, it would be sublimely right, it would be right, it is right.

image source: flickr.com/photos/foxybearsfun