The Unsettled Feeling of Spring

Feb 27 2018

As darkness descends

it feels like a thick cloak, enclosing me,

a velvet hood

muffling my head.

When my field of vision constricts

and along with it, the world;

so life seems so much simpler

and under control.

Perhaps this explains

the unsettled feeling of spring,

the drastically lengthening days

the sun's implacable light.

As opposed to winter's fastness,

when the duration of day seems stable

and night's embrace persists.

The glow of the hearth

the roof buried in snow.

The smudged bulwark of trees,

and cold dry air

sitting heavily on earth.

When all the dirt and rust and discarded stuff

are subsumed in a mantle of white,

and the steady accumulation of snow

is oddly comforting.

Although there was that hard season

when the snow seemed continuous,

and the compressed lower layers
were like the building blocks of glaciers.
As if a new ice age

had surreptitiously crept-up,

and we would all soon be submerged

beneath a thousand frozen feet.

Like Atlantis, or Pompeii, but under the ice;

an ancient civilization

that would some day be revealed

as ice relents
and water recedes,

the tips of towers, masts, and minarets

in pools of glacial melt.

I know how spring should feel,

the welcome sun, the easy heat

the season of rebirth.

But I find it all too fast.

Not a constant rate, but exponential.

Not an orderly succession, but somehow unsettling.

Like chaos theory,

the tiny disturbance

that triggers an unpredictable chain of events;

so unstoppable,

so out of proportion

to what set it off.

I hear the eaves drip, rivulets gurgle

warm breezes caress the earth.

And my mind leapfrogs

to the hot indolence of summer,

when the length of day

will be settled again,

and soft lingering light

will comfort, not blind.

When our blood will be thin

and the living easy

and the world at peace.

When we will be done

with the mad courtship of spring;

the buds unfurled

the trees full.

I've acknowledged before my fondness for night, my nocturnal habit, my affinity for winter. Allusions have appeared in numerous poems. So I was reluctant to plow this furrow again. But there are only so many poems and so many themes, and the joy of writing is much more the how than the what. So I gave myself permission to have a go at this one more time. Perhaps to bring it all together, and perhaps to state it with self-confidence and simplicity. By this I mean an easy conversational tone; something I almost always aspire to. Which may not be so evident, since I probably almost always fail as well. I hope I did better here. If I have, it may be because this poem was written almost without pause, as if taking dictation; and because I tried to be more confessional than premeditated, more stream-of-conscious than artful. And yes, it does feel confessional, because who wants to admit to feeling unsettled by spring, the season of rebirth and renewal? Or to own such an aversion to change? And confessional because night, of course, is not only dangerous, but the terrain of debauchery and secrecy; while daylight implies safety, health, and transparency.

The poem brackets this unsettled sense with stanzas that reinforce the constancy of winter and summer. There are key words like stable, settled, fastness (one of those odd English words that can have opposite meanings, depending on its context), persists, indolence, and lingering. There is the cold air, sitting heavily, and the steady accumulation of snow. There is the hearth, with its connotation of permanence and home, and which sits cozily beneath a roof heavy with snow. And set against these are words like chaos, drastically, fast, implacable, and exponential. Which is how day length looks, if you graph it over a year: it forms a sine wave, where spring and fall are the inflection points where the rate of change changes, followed by the steeply sloped plunge or ascent; while winter and summer are the relative flat turns at the bottom and top.

Common sense would have it that far more people dislike winter than spring. On the other hand, I believe statistics reveal that spring is the high season for suicide. So maybe spring is more commonly the low point, after all. Or at least among people at the extremes. Of course, there are other reasons to dislike spring, aside from the runaway train of day-length and the feeling of being pushed out of my comfort zone. Taxes come due. The dogs are a mess, and they track it all inside. And for me, it's mostly the driving. My country lane can turn into a quagmire for a couple of weeks, and driving becomes a real challenge. A toss-up, I suppose, between being snow-stayed and mud-stayed.